The left side is a squished手, which means “hand.” So, it means to have something in hand, i.e. This character means “temple,” but has no inherent meaning in 持 it merely provided a hint to the pronunciation. The phonetic component is on the right: 寺. It’s not immediately obvious how it all fits together due to the morphing of some base parts. Similarly to the previous character, it’s also a phono-semantickanji (most kanji are). This one also comes from China, but hasn’t changed much since ancient times. Today it carries many meanings, namely air, spirit, feeling, mood, sense, etc. The complicated 氣 character was then simplified to its modern 気 form. So, we combine the breath of life 气 with the food of life 米 and we end up with 氣.īeyond that, you can even imagine the 气 (steam) rising off the cooked 米 (rice). Rice, being one of the most important foodstuffs in Asia, is also synonymous with being the “spirit” of life itself. This 气 character can be pronounced “ki” as well.īut, to top it off, because it’s a picture of breath, we get an incidental bit of semantic meaning as well. The phonetic component is 气, supposedly an abstraction of breath as visible on a cold day. What that means is that inside this little kanji there are hints to both is phonetic nature, as well as its meaning. 気 belongs to a category of characters known as phono-semantic compound characters. This character has a pretty interesting etymology. There are some other ways it has been written throughout history, but we’re going to stick to these two main versions today. This is actually a newer form of a far older character (more than two thousand years old!) that comes direct from China, 氣. The meaning of this word is all being held up in those two kanji characters. Then, we can write it with a mix of hiragana and kanji (Chinese characters) as 気持ち, or even as pure kanji just by dropping that last character to make 気持. These are straightforward, one-to-one connections between sound and syllable. Kimochi can be written a few ways in Japanese. Kimochii (with a long -ii sound) means “good feeling.” Kimochi is a “feeling.” This type of feeling is usually one brought on by some stimulation and is something of a non-persisting state of feeling.

What is the meaning of kimochi in Japanese? In this article we’ll cover the basic meaning, as well as dive into the characters a bit, and see how it’s used in various ways.īut let’s start at the beginning-what does kimochi mean? In fact, you may have even heard it and not realized it, as it’s morphed into some slang forms as well. If you’re familiar at all with Japanese media, you’ve probably encountered the word kimochi quite a few times and in quite a few different contexts.

Totemo kimochi ga ii