First opened Wednesday, September 5, 2012
無駄遣い
むだづかい
- 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).
waste money on, squander money on
Mudazukai is 無駄 (“futility, waste”) plus 遣い (“use, usage”).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Wiktionary's text doesn't split this word, so each part is one of its kanji (with the okurigana written after it), with the reading and the dictionary meaning KANJIDIC2 gives that character — a word doesn't always use every sense of its kanji.
In a sentence
無駄遣いをするな。
Don't waste your money.
彼は妻の無駄遣いに渋い顔をする。
He frowns on his wife's wasting money.
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 無駄 (“futility, waste”) + 遣い (“use, usage”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 無駄遣い (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.
- 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).