Word
空しい
Meaning in Englishvacant, futile, vain
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Word context
What it means
空しい means empty or hollow in a moral, emotional, or existential sense. It describes states, feelings, or experiences that lack substance, value, or purpose.
Main meanings
- physical emptiness or void
- emotional futility or meaninglessness
- hollow, devoid of substance
- desolate or unsatisfying outcomes
How to use it
空しい describes emptiness across physical, emotional, or existential states and appears in both literary and everyday speech. It can modify nouns directly in compounds like 空しい人生 or 空しい気持ち, or function as a predicate with です/だ in sentences.
Variants and close terms
- 虚しい (munashii) — same meaning
- 空虚な (kūkyona) — hollow/emptiness
- むなしさ (munashisa) — the noun form meaning emptiness
- 有意義な (yuigina) — meaningful, opposite
Composition
- 空: conveys emptiness or void; in this word it contributes the basic idea of emptiness
- しい: a common i-adjective ending that forms adjectives from a noun or stem
Word class
adjective (形容詞・イ形容詞)
Word
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