First opened Tuesday, December 28, 2010
小さな
ちいさな
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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
Chiisana appears starting from the Muromachi period, as the -na adjective form of 小さい.
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
小さな親切大きな成果。
A little kindness goes a long way.
小さな円を書きなさい。
Draw a small circle.
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.
- “Appears starting from the Muromachi period (室(むろ)町(まち)時(じ)代(だい) (Muromachi jidai), c. 1336–1573).”
- “Derived as the -na adjective construction of -i adjective 小(ちい)さい (chīsai, “small, little”), which see for more.”
Source: Wiktionary: 小さな (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.