First opened Saturday, April 21, 2012
望ましい
のぞましい
- 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).
desirable, hoped for
Nozomashii is 望ま (nozoma), the irrealis of 望む (nozomu, “to wish, to hope, to want, to desire”), plus しい (-shī, adjective-forming suffix).
Taken apart
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Written with 望
In a sentence
彼女はひとりでやるのが望ましい。
It is preferable that she do it alone.
誰もけがをしないことが望ましい。
It is desirable that nobody should be hurt.
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 望(のぞ)ま (nozoma, 未(み)然(ぜん)形(けい) (mizenkei, “irrealis form”) of the verb 望(のぞ)む (nozomu, “to wish, to hope, to want, to desire”)) + しい (-shī, adjective-forming suffix).”
Source: Wiktionary: 望ましい (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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.