First opened Wednesday, November 21, 2012
活発
かっぱつ
- flat (heiban)
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).
vigor, active
In kappatsu, 発 is a daiyōji replacing 潑.
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
うちの母は活発です。
My mother is active.
私たちは活発な討論をした。
We had a very vigorous debate.
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.
- “/*kwatupatu/ → /kwappat͡su/ → /kappat͡su/”
- “発 is a daiyōji replacing 潑.”
Source: Wiktionary: 活発 (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
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.