良い
Meaning in Englishgood, nice
Animated kanji stroke order
Related sentences
Word context
What it means
What does 良い mean? 良い (yoi) is a basic Japanese adjective that expresses positive evaluation, indicating that something is of acceptable quality, desirable, suitable, or satisfactory in a given context.
Main meanings
- Approval/consent — used alone to signal agreement or that something is acceptable.
- Acceptability/adequacy — marks that a condition or level is satisfactory rather than excellent.
- Preference/desirability — indicates someone prefers or favors a choice.
- Moral/ethical quality — applied to actions or people to mean virtuous or praiseworthy.
- Modifier in compounds — used to create phrases meaning favorable, beneficial, or well-functioning.
How to use it
Used across everyday and formal speech to evaluate people, things or situations; the colloquial spoken form いい (ii) appears most often in casual conversation, while the dictionary/combining form よい (yoi) appears before certain conjugations and in some set expressions and written contexts; it appears with polite auxiliaries to soften statements and in adjectives' conjugated forms to express tense or negation.
Variants and close terms
- いい (ii) — colloquial variant commonly used in speech.
- 良好 (ryōkō) — favorable, in good condition (more formal/compound).
- 優しい (yasashii) — kind, gentle (overlapping positive nuance but not identical).
- 悪い (warui) — bad, opposite/antonym.
Composition
The kanji 良 functions as a single-character adjective root meaning 'good'; its common readings are the kun'yomi yoi used as the adjective and the on'yomi ryō used in Sino-Japanese compounds, and it serves as the semantic nucleus in compound words that convey favorable or positive qualities.
Etymology
良い (yoi) descends from Old Japanese 良し (yosi) and underwent regular sound changes in Middle Japanese that produced the modern irregular colloquial form いい (ii); the shift involves phonetic reduction and historical assimilation of the medial consonant.
Origin
The written character 良 arrived in Japan with Chinese characters during the early historical period (Asuka–Nara); the semantic concept of 'goodness' appears throughout Heian and later literature and in administrative and Buddhist texts where the character was used to record positive judgments and desirable states.
Word class
adjective (i-adjective, い形容詞)