First opened Saturday, January 14, 2012
華やか
はなやか
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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).
brilliant, gorgeous, florid
Hanayaka is 花 (hana, “flower”) plus やか (-yaka, “seeming like”), and the source compares English flowery.
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 華
In a sentence
ショービジネスというのは本当に華やかだ。
Show business is really glamorous.
アカデミー授賞式は、ハリウッド最大の華やかな催しだ。
The Oscar ceremonies are Hollywood's biggest extravaganza.
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.
- “花(はな) (hana, “flower”) + やか (-yaka, “seeming like”); compare English flowery.”
Source: Wiktionary: 華やか (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.