喜ぶ
Meaning in Englishrejoice, be glad
Animated kanji stroke order
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Word context
What it means
喜ぶ means to feel glad or pleased about something; it expresses an internal happiness in response to a favorable event, and is used to describe the subject's joyful reaction in everyday and formal speech.
Main meanings
- an internal response of happiness or satisfaction to good news or a favorable outcome
- to express joy for another person’s success or a positive development
- used in polite forms to describe one’s own or others' happiness in social contexts
How to use it
喜ぶ describes a person’s emotional reaction to a favorable event and is used with the experiencer as the subject marked by が; emphasis can be on the moment of joy or on the expression of happiness, with polite forms like 喜びます used in formal settings and 喜んで before accompanying actions to mean 'with pleasure'.
Variants and close terms
- 嬉しい (ureshii) — happy, often used as an adjective to describe the speaker’s current feeling
- 歓ぶ (yorokobu) — literary/synonymous form for rejoicing, with similar pronunciation
- 悲しむ (kanashimu) — to feel sad, antonym
Composition
- 喜: joy, pleasure
- ぶ: native verb ending that turns the stem into an intransitive verb
Etymology
etymology The word combines the kanji 喜 meaning joy with the native verb ending -ぶ, using the kun reading yoroko to form the modern verb; this reflects a direct phonetic and semantic development from the kanji meaning to a plain intransitive verb expressing personal happiness.
Origin
Classical Japanese evidence for 喜ぶ appears in literary sources from the Heian period onward, with the verb in kun readings describing personal joy; through the Edo period it remained a common verb for expressing delighted reactions in conversation, poetry, and prose, maintaining its basic sense of inner happiness into modern Japanese.
Word class
verb (五段動詞, intransitive)