First opened Tuesday, February 5, 2013
善し悪し
よしあし
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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).
good or bad, merits or demerits, quality
Yoshiashi is 善し (“classical Japanese of now 良い (yoi)”) plus 悪し (“classical Japanese synonym of 悪い (warui)”).
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
よしあしは別としてとにかくやってみよう。
Whether it's good or not, let's do it anyway.
この女の子はまだ小さくてもののよしあしがわからない。
The girl is not old enough to be responsible.
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 善し (“classical Japanese of now 良(よ)い (yoi)”) + 悪し (“classical Japanese synonym of 悪(わる)い (warui)”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 善し悪し (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.