弱い
Meaning in Englishweak
Animated kanji stroke order
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Word context
What it means
What does 弱い mean? It means lacking strength or power in physical, mental, or functional senses, used to describe people, objects, or situations that are not strong. In everyday Japanese it covers health, character, or performance contexts.
Main meanings
- Physical strength and health: describes someone frail or in poor health.
- Mental or emotional resilience: describes lack of resolve, courage, or fortitude.
- Effectiveness or intensity: describes something weak in performance, signal, or flavor.
How to use it
Used across casual and formal speech to describe physical weakness, mental vulnerability, or poor performance of objects, teams, or strategies; in grammar, 弱い attaches as an i-adjective in predicates, with polite forms like 弱いです; common collocations include 体が弱い and 弱い立場.
Variants and close terms
- か弱い (kayowai) – frail, delicate
- 軟弱 (nanjaku) – weak, spineless
- 強い (tsuyoi) – strong (antonym)
Composition
- 弱: means weak, the core semantic field of the word
- い: adjectival suffix that turns the root into an i-adjective
Etymology
Phonetic evolution uses kun-reading yowai; the kanji 弱 has on-reading jaku used in compounds, reflecting Sino-Japanese influence on readings.
Origin
Historical usage traces back to classical Japanese, with kanji borrowed from Chinese; by the Edo period 弱い was common in everyday language and literature.
Word class
adjective (i-adjective)