First opened Wednesday, December 22, 2010
軽い
かるい
- flat (heiban)
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).
light, non-serious, minor
Karui was seldom used outside of proper nouns in Old Japanese, spelled 軽 in the Man'yōshū.
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 軽
In a sentence
超軽量新素材の採用により、従来の約半分（当社比）という圧倒的な軽さを実現！
As a result of new ultra-light materials, our product now only weighs about half as much as before!
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.
- Hedged“From Old Japanese, in turn from Proto-Japonic *karu. In Old Japanese, seldom used outside of proper nouns, where in the Kojiki it is spelled as 加流 and in the Man'yōshū it is spelled as 軽, suggesting that this word was already used in Old Japanese with the meaning "light, lightweight". This might be weakly strengthened by a kana annotation of 軽 as karu(ku) in the Nihon Shoki.”
- “It is generally believed that karu(si) was the older form; this is also supported by Ryukyuan cognates (see Proto-Ryukyuan *karu). In the Heian period and Kamakura period, the variant かろし (karoshi) → かろい (karoi) has started to be in use, while 軽し (karushi) → 軽い (karui) has still seldom usage.”
- “Later, both karosi and karusi began to be used in parallel. Then, in Early Modern Japanese, karui slowly began to replace karoi.”
Source: Wiktionary: 軽い (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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.