First opened Friday, April 15, 2011
嬉しい
うれしい
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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).
to be happy; to be glad
Ureshii might come from 熟れる (ureru, “to ripen, mature”) plus しい, though it is unclear how “feeling mature” matches “glad”.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
Written with 嬉
In a sentence
ああ嬉しい。
How glad I am!
うれしくないの？
Aren't you happy?
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.
- “From Old Japanese. First cited to the Man'yōshu of circa 759 CE.”
- Hedged“A surface analysis suggests that this might be derived from 熟れる (ureru, “to ripen, mature”) + しい (shii, “adjective forming suffix”). However, it is unclear how the sense of "feeling mature" would match the sense of "glad".”
Source: Wiktionary: 嬉しい (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.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.