First opened Tuesday, February 1, 2011
重い
おもい
- 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).
heavy; serious
Omoi is the attributive form of Early Middle Japanese 重し (omoshi), with the medial k fallen out.
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 重
In a sentence
この本は重い。
This book is heavy.
重そうですから。
Because it seems to be heavy.
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 おもき (omoki), the 連体形 (rentaikei, “attributive form”) of Early Middle Japanese adjective 重し (omoshi), with the medial /-k-/ falling out; eventually from Proto-Japonic *onpo.”
Source: Wiktionary: 重い (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.