悪
Meaning in Englishevil, vice, badness
Animated kanji stroke order
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Word context
What it means
What does 悪 (warui) mean? It denotes moral or qualitative negativity — a concept applied to actions, qualities, conditions, or intentions judged harmful, undesirable, or morally wrong by speakers.
Main meanings
- 1. Moral wrongdoing or evil as a noun, referring to harmful intentions or actions distinct from legal guilt.
- 2. Poor quality or unfavorable condition when describing objects, situations, or performance.
- 3. Physical illness or feeling unwell in casual contexts referring to health or sensation.
- 4. Regret or an unfortunate turn of events used to express that something is regrettable or undesirable.
- 5. A bound element in compounds giving the sense of "mal-", "vice-" or negative polarity to nouns.
How to use it
Used across registers: as an ordinary adjective in everyday speech to mark something as bad, as a noun in moral or philosophical discussion about evil, and widely inside compound words to express negative qualities; casual conversations favor the native adjectival forms while formal writing or compounds often use Sino-Japanese elements.
Variants and close terms
- 良い (yoi) — good (antonym)
- 善 (zen) — virtue, goodness (antonym)
- 邪悪 (jaaku) — extreme wickedness, evil (synonym with stronger nuance)
- 悪人 (akunin) — evil person (derived noun)
Composition
The character 悪 historically combines an upper phonetic element (classically 亞/亜) and a lower semantic element meaning heart (心 in older forms), so the written composition evokes a corrupted or harmful disposition—hence the semantic field around badness and ill will.
Etymology
悪: the Sino-Japanese on reading aku derives from a Middle Chinese pronunciation reconstructed as *ʔak/*ngak, while the native kun reading waru- represents an Old Japanese adjectival stem; the character entered Japanese via phonetic borrowing from Chinese while native grammar produced the adjective forms.
Origin
The idea and written form arrived with Chinese characters and continental thought during the early historic period; it appears in classical Chinese texts and Buddhist/Confucian literature that shaped Japanese moral vocabulary, and was adopted into Japanese writing and speech from the classical era onward.
Word class
Adjective (i-adjective, い形容詞) and noun (名詞)