First opened Tuesday, February 8, 2011
強い
つよい
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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).
strong, powerful
Tsuyoi is found in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE, from Proto-Japonic *tuyə.
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 強
In a sentence
悪運が強い。
Have the devil's own luck.
風の強い日です。
It's a windy day.
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 Old Japanese. Found in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE. In turn from Proto-Japonic *tuyə. Cognate with Miyako 強 (tsū), Okinawan 強ーさん (chūsan).”
Source: Wiktionary: 強い (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 強い on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not つよい. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
こわい
- “From Old Japanese. Appears in the Nihon Shoki, c. CE 720. Ultimately from Proto-Japonic *kƏpa.”
- “Cognate with 怖い (kowai, “scary, frightening”), apparently from the sense of freezing from fright. Likely also cognate with other terms beginning with ko- and related to senses of hard, stiff, such as 凝る (koru, “to stiffen”), 凍ゆ (koyu, “to freeze, to become frozen”, classical) → modern 凍える (kogoeru).”
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.