First opened Thursday, November 4, 2010
古い
ふるい
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
How to read it: a line over a kana means the voice is high there, and ↓ marks where it drops. A kana with no line is low. With no ↓ the pitch stays high to the end and does not drop even on a following particle (が, は).
old (in reference to objects, not people), aged, ancient
Furui is derived from the verb 旧る (furu, “to age”) plus し (-shi), an adjective-forming suffix.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
Written with 古
In a sentence
母は頭が古い。
Mother has old-fashioned ideas.
私の机は古い。
My desk is old.
Sentences are from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), picked by fixed rules from a dated export and shown unchanged. Nobody has reviewed them one by one.
What Wiktionary says
Quoted line by line from Wiktionary's Etymology section for this reading, taken from one dated dump so it can't change underneath us. Nothing below is paraphrased.
- “From Old Japanese. Attested in the Man'yōshū completed in 759.”
- “In turn, derived from verb 旧(ふ)る (furu, “to age, to become older”, said of both things and people) + し (-shi, Old and Classical Japanese adjective-forming suffix), with the verb itself also attested in the Man'yōshū.”
- “The modern form 古(ふる)い (furui) emerged as a regular shift from 古(ふる)き (furuki), the 連(れん)体(たい)形(けい) (rentaikei, “attributive form”) of classical adjective 古(ふる)し (furushi).”
- “⟨puruki₁⟩ → */puruki/ → /furui/”
Source: Wiktionary: 古い (dump of 2026-09-02), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Reading, meaning and part of speech from JMdict, and kanji readings from KANJIDIC2 (EDRDG).
What the labels mean
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.