First opened Monday, September 5, 2011
おっかない
おっかない
- 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).
frightening, scary
Okkanai is uncertain: perhaps from archaic おおけなし (ookenashi, “impudent, undisciplined”), or from おっかながる (okkanagaru, “to be afraid, be nervous”).
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
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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.
- Hedged“Uncertain. Perhaps from archaic おおけなし (ookenashi, “impudent, undisciplined”). Alternately, perhaps from おっかながる (okkanagaru, “to be afraid, be nervous”). The Linguistic Atlas of Japan suggested that the word was once common in the Tōhoku and Kantō regions, but it became increasingly colloquial or intimate during the early modern period (c. 17th to 19th century).”
Source: Wiktionary: おっかない (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.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.