First opened Thursday, March 29, 2012
呆気ない
あっけない
- 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).
not enough, too quick (short, long, etc.)
Akkenai is from 飽く気なし (aku ke nashi).
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
彼はあっけなく負けてしまった。
He was beaten too easily.
休暇はいつもあっけなく終わる。
The holidays always end all too soon.
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.
- “From 飽く気なし (aku ke nashi).”
Source: Wiktionary: 呆気ない (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
- 混種語 Hybrid
- Words that mix layers, e.g. a native part with a Chinese one.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.