Beautiful in Japanese is 美しい, said utsukushii. Its kanji, 美, has nine strokes and is filed under 羊, the sheep radical, with 大 (big) underneath. In conversation most people say きれい (kirei) instead, a word that also means clean. Written in hiragana the adjective is うつくしい, and in katakana ウツクシイ.
Beautiful in Japanese
Beautiful in Japanese is two words, and the choice between them is the whole lesson.
A friend shows you a photo of the sea at sunset. You say きれい! (kirei!), pretty, lovely, and nobody blinks. At a wedding, the speech praises 美しい花嫁 (utsukushii hanayome), the beautiful bride, and the word sounds right because the moment is formal. Swap them and both sentences still work, but the first turns stiff and the second turns casual.
The dictionaries draw the line clearly. In modern speech, きれい is the default: なんてきれい (nante kirei), how pretty, is what people actually say, and なんて美しい sounds a little composed. 美しい leans toward beauty that moves you from the inside: 美しい心 (utsukushii kokoro), a beautiful heart, or 日本の美しい自然, the beautiful nature of Japan. You would not call a friendship きれい. きれい leans toward the surface: vivid, clean, neat. Clean air is きれいな空気, never 美しい空気.
Utsukushii and Kirei Meaning
Utsukushii (美しい) means beautiful: colours, shapes and sounds in harmony, and also conduct worth admiring. It is an ordinary i-adjective, うつくしい in hiragana, said “oo-tsoo-koo-shee.”
It did not start there. In the oldest poetry the word was tenderness toward family. A poem in the eighth-century Man’yoshu uses it for the love a man feels looking at his wife and children. By the Heian court it had narrowed to small, lovable things, and Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book sums it up: anything small is utsukushi. That is closer to kawaii than to beauty. Only later did the word widen to beauty in general.
Kirei (綺麗) means pretty and beautiful, but also clean, tidy, neat, and even completely: きれいに忘れた (kirei ni wasureta), I forgot it completely. A sign in a public toilet asking you to use it きれいに is asking for clean, not pretty. It is also spelled 奇麗.
One grammar trap catches everyone. Kirei ends in -i but it is a na-adjective, so a pretty flower is きれいな花, not きれい花, and it was pretty is きれいだった, not きれいかった.
The question 私、きれい? (watashi, kirei?), am I pretty?, is the most chilling use of the word in Japanese. It belongs to kuchisake-onna, the slit-mouthed woman of the urban legend.
The Kanji for Beautiful: 美
- Character: 美
- On’yomi: ビ (bi), and ミ (mi) in names
- Kun’yomi: うつく(しい) (utsukushii)
- Stroke count: 9
- General meaning: beauty, beautiful; also fine, delicious, praiseworthy
- Radical: 羊 (sheep), Kangxi radical 123, with three strokes added
It is taught in the third year of Japanese primary school and is usually listed at JLPT N3. The Jōyō table gives only bi and utsukushii, but the old reading mi is everywhere in girls’ names: 由美 (Yumi), 美咲 (Misaki), 美穂 (Miho).
The kirei kanji are a different story. 綺麗 is 綺 (fourteen strokes, figured silk) plus 麗 (nineteen strokes, beautiful). 麗 is in the Jōyō list, taught in secondary school. 綺 is not; it is approved only for names. Thirty-three strokes for an everyday word is why most print simply writes きれい.
Japanese Symbol for Beautiful
美 is a sheep. Every explanation agrees on that much.
The classical Chinese dictionary Shuowen Jiezi reads it as 羊 over 大, a big sheep, and glosses it as sweet, tasty. Beauty and flavour shared a character, which is why 美味しい (oishii, delicious) is still written with 美 today. The scholar Shirakawa Shizuka read the same shape differently: the whole character is one picture of a sheep, the lower part being its hind legs, and 美 praised a sheep perfect enough for sacrifice. A fat sheep or a flawless offering. Either way, beauty began with livestock.
The 大 at the bottom is the character on big in Japanese, and in modern 美 it is written exactly that way.
綺麗 has its own pictures. 綺 is silk, the 糸 radical, woven in a twill whose diagonal pattern plain cloth cannot match, and the dictionaries say that is why it came to mean beautiful. 麗 is a deer, and the shape at its top shows a pair of antlers. The character also means a pair, which is why a married couple can be called 伉儷 (kourei) in formal writing.
How to Write 美 in Japanese
Nine strokes, top to bottom: six for the sheep, three for 大.
Begin with the two short horns, left then right, slanting toward each other. Then the sheep’s body, written like 王: a horizontal, a second horizontal, a short vertical down the middle, and a third horizontal to close it. The vertical stops there. It does not run down into the bottom half.
Then 大: the long horizontal, the stroke sweeping down to the left, and the stroke sweeping down to the right.
The proportions are a stack of lines that get wider toward the bottom. The horizontal of 大 is the longest stroke in the character, and the sheep’s three lines above it should be evenly spaced, so the whole thing reads like a small pagoda. Crowd them and 美 becomes a striped block.
How to Say Beautiful in Japanese
Utsukushii is five beats, “oo-tsoo-koo-shee,” with the final ii held for two counts. In natural speech the middle vowels are often whispered, so it can sound close to “oots-koo-shee.” Kirei is “kee-ray,” with the r a light tap of the tongue.
Real sentences:
- わあ、きれい!(Waa, kirei!) Oh, how pretty!
- きれいな花ですね。(Kirei na hana desu ne.) What a lovely flower.
- 富士山が美しいです。(Fujisan ga utsukushii desu.) Mount Fuji is beautiful.
- 部屋をきれいにしてください。(Heya o kirei ni shite kudasai.) Please tidy your room.
- 彼女は美しい日本語を話す。(Kanojo wa utsukushii nihongo o hanasu.) She speaks beautiful Japanese.
The fourth sentence is the one learners miss. きれいにする is to clean up. Nobody is being asked to make the room beautiful.
Words and Compounds With 美
| Word | Reading | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 美人 | bijin | a beautiful woman |
| 美術 | bijutsu | fine art |
| 美術館 | bijutsukan | an art museum |
| 美容院 | biyouin | a beauty salon |
| 美味しい | oishii | delicious |
| 美学 | bigaku | aesthetics; a personal code |
| 優美 | yuubi | grace, elegance |
| 褒美 | houbi | a reward |
美学 is the one with a second life. In philosophy it is aesthetics. In speech, 男の美学 (otoko no bigaku) is a man’s personal code, the private rules about how he will and will not behave.
The kirei family is smaller. 綺麗事 (kireigoto) is fine talk, the pretty words that dodge an ugly truth. 小綺麗 (kogirei) is neat and presentable. And from 麗 comes 容姿端麗 (youshi tanrei), good-looking and well-proportioned, a stock phrase for describing someone’s looks.
Beautiful in Japanese Culture
Much of what Japan is famous for finding beautiful is not kirei at all. A cracked tea bowl, moss on a stone lantern, a garden half lost in mist. Wabi-sabi finds beauty in the worn and imperfect. Yugen finds it in what is only half seen. Our guide to the seven principles of Japanese aesthetics sets out the whole vocabulary, and none of its terms is the plain word 美.
That gap is part of the story of 美 itself. 美術 (fine art) and 美学 (aesthetics) are both words coined in the Meiji period to translate Western ideas, and for a while they sat awkwardly beside an older, richer native vocabulary. The words people actually used for beauty in a tea room or a poem were things like wabi, iki and miyabi, each with its own shade.
The Heian sense of utsukushi survives, too, in a different word. The love of the small, the soft and the young that Sei Shonagon listed now lives in kawaii. And the plainest beauty word of all, きれい, carries a cultural assumption inside it: that clean and beautiful are close to the same thing. A swept entrance, a wiped counter, a folded towel. In Japanese, all of them are kirei.
If you are after single words with that kind of depth, our list of beautiful Japanese words is the place to start, and snow in Japanese shows how one season became a byword for elegance.
As a Tattoo
美 is a lovely shape and an understandable choice, but know how it reads. On its own it says beauty as an abstract noun, and in Japan it is also the working character of the beauty industry, the 美 of 美容 (biyou, beauty care) on salon and clinic signs. A Japanese reader may also take it as part of a woman’s name. None of that is wrong. It is simply less poetic than English speakers expect.
Check pairings carefully. 美人 (bijin) means a beautiful woman, which reads oddly on a man. The best-known trap is 美人局, which looks like beautiful woman plus bureau and is read tsutsumotase: a blackmail scam in which a woman lures a man so her partner can extort him. Kanji set side by side form dictionary words, not a sum of ideas.
Do not tattoo the adjective. 美しい carries hiragana endings, the way an English tattoo might read “beautifully,” and きれい is as likely to be read as clean or tidy as beautiful. 綺麗, at thirty-three strokes, will also blur into a dark patch long before you are old.
On script: 美 is identical in Japanese, simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese, and the Mandarin reading is měi. Be aware that in Chinese 美 is also short for America, as in 美国 (Měiguó, the United States), so a Chinese reader may see a second meaning. 麗 is written 丽 in simplified Chinese, so a reference image showing 丽 is not the Japanese form.
Confirm with a native speaker before you ink. You can preview the character in vertical and horizontal layouts with the Japanese Tattoo Generator, and read the wider background in our guide to japanese tattoo meanings.
Related Kanji
For more characters worth wearing or writing, browse the kanji library.
Sources and Further Reading
- 常用漢字表 (Cabinet Notice No. 2 of 2010), Agency for Cultural Affairs Jōyō readings of 美 and 麗; 綺 is not on the list
- Unihan database entry for 美 (U+7F8E), Unicode Consortium Kangxi radical 123, nine strokes
- 美, Digital Daijisen and Jitsū (Kotobank) third-grade kanji, the readings bi and mi, the Shuowen and Shirakawa readings of the sheep
- 美しい, Digital Daijisen and Nihon Kokugo Daijiten (Kotobank) how utsukushii and kirei divide the work, the Man'yoshu and Pillow Book senses
- 綺麗, Digital Daijisen, Nihon Kokugo Daijiten and Jitsū (Kotobank) pretty, clean, completely; the 奇麗 spelling; 綺 as figured silk
FAQ
How do you say beautiful in Japanese?
You can say utsukushii, written 美しい, or kirei, written きれい or 綺麗. In everyday conversation kirei is the common choice: わあ、きれい! is what people say at a view. Utsukushii is slightly more formal and suits writing, speeches, and beauty that moves you, like 美しい心, a beautiful heart.
What is the difference between utsukushii and kirei?
Utsukushii (美しい) leans toward deep, moving beauty, the kind in nature, music or character, and sounds a little formal. Kirei (綺麗) is the everyday word and also means clean, tidy and neat. Clean air is きれいな空気, never 美しい空気, and a beautiful friendship is 美しい, not きれい.
What is the kanji for beautiful?
The kanji for beautiful is 美, nine strokes, filed under 羊, the sheep radical, Kangxi number 123. Its readings are ビ (bi) and うつく(しい) (utsukushii), plus mi in names. It is taught in third grade. The other word, kirei, is written 綺麗, though most print uses hiragana.
What is the Japanese symbol for beauty?
美 is the written symbol for beauty: a sheep over 大 (big). One reading says a big sheep tasted good, which is why 美味しい (oishii, delicious) uses the same character. Another reads it as a picture of a perfect sacrificial sheep. In daily life it also signals the beauty industry, through 美容 (biyou, beauty care).
What does watashi kirei mean?
私、きれい? (watashi, kirei?) means am I pretty? It is the question asked by kuchisake-onna, the slit-mouthed woman of the Japanese urban legend, before she lowers her mask. In ordinary life the same words would just be someone fishing for a compliment, with kirei in its everyday sense of pretty.
Is 美 the same character in Chinese?
Yes. Japanese, simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese all write 美, and the Mandarin reading is měi. In Chinese it is also the abbreviation for America, as in 美国 (Měiguó), where Japanese uses 米国 instead. The kirei kanji differ more: 麗 is 丽 in simplified Chinese.