First opened Monday, July 18, 2011
浮気
うわき
- 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).
affair, to cheat
Uwaki is 上 (uwa, “over”) plus 気 (ki, “spirit”), with 浮 an example of jukujikun.
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.
In a sentence
彼は浮気していた。
He was cheating.
その浮気は内輪の秘密だ。
That love affair is a family secret.
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.
- “/ufa ki/ → /uwaki/”
- “Compound of 上(うわ) (uwa, “over”) + 気(き) (ki, “spirit”). The use of 浮 is an example of jukujikun (熟(じゅく)字(じ)訓(くん)).”
Source: Wiktionary: 浮気 (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
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.