First opened Monday, November 7, 2011
左利き
ひだりきき
- 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).
left-handedness, sake drinker, left-hander
Hidarikiki is 左 (hidari, “left”) plus 利き (kiki, “effective”), with kiki voiced to giki by rendaku.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
僕は左利きです。
I'm left-handed.
私は私の左利きの彼と共通点がない。
I don't have much in common with my left-handed boyfriend.
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.
- “Compound of 左 (hidari, “left”) + 利き (kiki, “effective”). The kiki changes to giki as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
Source: Wiktionary: 左利き (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).