First opened Friday, November 26, 2010
厳しい
きびしい
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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).
hard; rigorous; strict
Kibishii was kibishi, “tight, close, without gaps”, first cited to roughly 830.
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 厳
In a sentence
我々の先生はきびしい。
Our teacher is stern to us.
彼は厳しい批判にさらされた。
He was subjected to severe criticism.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “Originally from regular classical adjective 厳し (kibishi, “tight, close, without gaps”), first cited to roughly 830.”
- Hedged“This earlier form later shifted conjugation patterns, from the so-called "-ku adjective" to the "-shiku adjective" pattern. The two conjugation types appear to have been in broadly free variation, with both forms developing the strict; severe senses in parallel. Historically, while there was some overlap, there does appear to be a sense distinction in Classical Japanese texts, wherein the older "-ku adjective" form was used more commonly to express the more objective qualities of "tight, close", while the "-shiku adjective" was used more commonly to express the more subjective qualities of "severe; harsh".”
- “The "-shiku adjective" pattern is first cited from the late 900s.”
Source: Wiktionary: 厳しい (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).
Other readings of 厳しい on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not きびしい. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
いつくしい
- “From Early Middle Japanese adjective 厳(いつく)し (itsukushi), with the 終(しゅう)止(し)形(けい) (shūshikei, “predicative form”) ending in し (shi) first replaced with the 連(れん)体(たい)形(けい) (rentaikei, “attributive form”) ending in しき (shiki), and then with the medial /-k-/ falling out to result in an ending of しい (shii).”
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.