First opened Friday, July 8, 2011
空しい
むなしい
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
- 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).
vacant, futile, vain
Munashii is むな (muna, “cavity, void, open space”) plus the adjective-forming suffix しい (shii).
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 空
In a sentence
彼の死は彼らの生活に空しさをもたらした。
His death has left a vacuum in their lives.
私はむなしく費やした時間を取り戻さなければ。
I must make up for lost time.
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. Appears in the earliest texts of the 700s CE, including the Nihon Shoki and the Man'yōshū. Ultimately from Proto-Japonic *muna.”
- “Analyzable as むな (muna, “cavity, void, open space”, combining form, spelled variously as 空, 虚, 胸, 棟; cognate with standalone nouns 胸 (mune, “chest”), 棟 (mune, “roof ridge”)) + adjective-forming suffix しい (shii).”
Source: Wiktionary: 空しい (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.