First opened Wednesday, December 1, 2010
小さい
ちいさい
- 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).
small, little
Chiisai went */tipisasi/ → /tiɸisasi/ → /t͡ɕiwisaɕi/ → /t͡ɕiːsaɕi/ → /t͡ɕiːsai/, and its derivation is uncertain.
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 小
In a sentence
小さすぎるわ。
It's too small.
この本は小さい。
This book is small.
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.
- “*/tipisasi/ → /tiɸisasi/ → /t͡ɕiwisaɕi/ → /t͡ɕiːsaɕi/ → /t͡ɕiːsai/”
- Hedged“Ultimate derivation uncertain.”
- “The initial chi element appears in other words with similar meanings of small, such as ちょっと (chotto, “a little bit”, adverb), from ちっと (chitto), emphatic geminate derived from even earlier ちと (chito), in which と (to) marks an adverb.”
- Hedged“Possibly related to ちび (chibi, “small and round”, often with overtones of cuteness), itself apparently derived from 粒(つぶ) (tsubu, “small round thing”, such as a grain of rice).”
- “First attested in the Nihon Shoki of 720, albeit in the ideographic spelling 細. First attested unambiguously in the late 800s, early 900s in the attributive inflection with the phonetic spelling 知比佐伊 (tifisai).”
Source: Wiktionary: 小さい (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.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.