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わかりみ wakarimi
I feel that in my bones.
What does wakarimi mean?
I get it, turned into a noun so it can have depth. It is almost always described as deep.
Example
その気持ち、わかりみが深い。
I feel that on a deep level.
Vibe
Who you can say this to, and how it lands.
Friends only Casual. Natural with friends, out of place at work or with strangers.
The story behind wakarimi
The suffix mi normally turns adjectives into nouns with substance: sweetness, depth, warmth. Around the middle of the 2010s young speakers started attaching it to things it has no business attaching to, including verbs, and a small grammatical fashion was born.
Wakarimi is that fashion at its purest. I understand becomes a measurable quantity, and it is almost always described as deep, which is much more expressive than simply agreeing. The construction spread across a whole family of coinages, most of them slightly ridiculous, all of them fun to say. Language teachers were briefly appalled. Everyone else understood immediately, which rather proved the point.
Get wakarimi in your pocket
わかりみ is one of 308 words in YABAI, a Japanese culture snack for Android. Every word comes with its meaning, an example sentence, a vibe check and a story like the one above — in 13 languages, read aloud by your device. Paid app: no ads, no sign-up, no subscription.
