First opened Saturday, September 24, 2011
見苦しい
みぐるしい
- 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).
unsightly, ugly
Migurushii is 見 (mi, “looking”) plus 苦しい (kurushii, “painful, agonising”), with kurushii voiced to gurushii by rendaku.
Taken apart
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In a sentence
ここだけの話だけれど、あの太った見苦しい魔女は減量中なのだ。
Between ourselves, the fat ugly witch is on a diet.
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.
- “見(み) (mi, “looking”, 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 見(み)る (miru, “to see, look”)) + 苦(くる)しい (kurushii, “painful, agonising”).”
- “The kurushii changes to gurushii as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
Source: Wiktionary: 見苦しい (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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).