First opened Friday, November 11, 2011
著しい
いちじるしい
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 5
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).
remarkable, considerable
Ichijirushii began as ichishirushi, 逸 (ichi-, “very”) plus 著し (shirushi), and shirushi was voiced to jirushi by rendaku in the Muromachi period.
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 著
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.
- “From 逸 (ichi-, “very”) + 著し (shirushi, “clear, obvious, conspicuous”, a ku-adjective).”
- “Attested in the Heian period as a ku-adjective pronounced いちしるし (ichishirushi). Since the Muromachi period, it became pronounced いちじるし (ichijirushi), where the shirushi changes to jirushi as an instance of rendaku (連濁). Since around the Edo period, it changed conjugation class and became a shiku-adjective.”
- “The modern form is from いちじるしき (ichijirushiki), the 連体形 (rentaikei, “attributive form”) of the Late Middle Japanese shiku-adjective いちじるし (ichijirushi), with the medial /-k-/ falling out.”
Source: Wiktionary: 著しい (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.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).