First opened Sunday, March 6, 2011
珍しい
めずらしい
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 4
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).
unusual, rare
Mezurashii ultimately comes from the verb 愛づ (medu), whose descendant 愛でる (mederu) means “to love; to admire”.
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 珍
In a sentence
彼が怒るのは珍しい。
It is rare for him to get angry.
月食は珍しい現象だ。
An eclipse of the moon is a rare phenomenon.
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 classical -na adjective 珍(めずら) (mezura) + しい (-shii, adjective-forming suffix).”
- “Ultimately from Old Japanese verb 愛づ (medu, medzu), modern Japanese 愛でる (mederu, “to love; to admire, to appreciate”).”
- “The meaning originally referred to something that was admirable or favorable, something that had value, as an extension of the underlying verb. This meaning is used in the Man'yōshū, dating to the mid-700s. This further extended to indicate something that was rare or unusual in ways that one would find notable or attractive, and this meaning was also already used in the Man'yōshū. Over time, the admirable sense weakened, and the rare sense became dominant.”
- “Cognate with Northern Amami Ōshima 珍っさり (むぃずぃらっさり, mïzïrassari).”
Source: Wiktionary: 珍しい (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.