First opened Thursday, August 23, 2012
生き甲斐
いきがい
- flat (heiban)
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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).
something one lives for, very important
Ikigai is 生きる (ikiru, “to live, to exist”) plus 甲斐 (kai, “worth, value”), with kai voiced to gai by rendaku.
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
私には生き甲斐がない。
I have nothing to live for.
彼女は息子が生きがいです。
Her son makes life worth living.
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 生きる (ikiru, “to live, to exist”) + 甲斐 (kai, “worth, value”).”
- “The kai changes to gai as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
Source: Wiktionary: 生き甲斐 (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
- 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).