綺麗
きれい
kirei
= beautiful, pretty; also clean and tidy
綺麗 is a word that pulls double duty, praising a sunset as beautiful and a kitchen as spotless, because in Japanese beauty and cleanliness live close together in a single な-adjective.
綺麗 means both beautiful and clean. It describes visual beauty, a person, a flower, scenery, and also a state of being neat, tidy, and unsoiled, a clean room, washed hands, a clear sky. As a な-adjective it becomes 綺麗な before a noun and 綺麗です in polite speech. Which sense applies, lovely or clean, depends on what is being described and the context.
Watch the conjugation trap: although it ends in い, 綺麗 is a な-adjective, so the negative is 綺麗じゃない, not the い-adjective form. Decide between beautiful and clean from context, for example 手を綺麗にする means make your hands clean, not beautiful. Saying 綺麗 to a person is a warm compliment, often felt as more graceful or refined than the cuter かわいい.
綺 refers to fine patterned silk, and 麗 means lovely or resplendent, so the compound 綺麗 originally evokes the beauty of elegant cloth. Despite the elaborate kanji, the word is extremely common and is very often written in hiragana きれい or katakana キレイ, especially in casual and advertising contexts. Note it is read きれい, not きれ.
Everyday use
部屋を綺麗に片付けたら、気分までさっぱりした。
Heya wo kirei ni katazuketara, kibun made sappari shita.
After tidying the room up nicely, even my mood felt refreshed.
Casual / Social Media
夜景が想像以上に綺麗で、思わず写真撮りまくった。
Yakei ga souzou ijou ni kirei de, omowazu shashin torimakutta.
The night view was even more beautiful than I imagined, so I ended up taking tons of photos.
Formal / Cultural context
庭師の手によって、庭園は隅々まで綺麗に整えられていた.
Niwashi no te ni yotte, teien wa sumizumi made kirei ni totonoerarete ita.
By the gardener’s hand, the garden had been beautifully tended down to every corner.
The fact that one word covers beauty and cleanliness says something about Japanese aesthetics, where order, freshness, and the absence of clutter are themselves felt as beautiful. A 綺麗 space is not merely sanitary but pleasing, and the overlap reflects a sensibility in which tidiness and beauty are not separate ideals but aspects of the same well-kept whole.
綺麗 also reveals how value is placed on neatness in daily Japanese life. To do something 綺麗に, finish a meal cleanly, write characters neatly, settle a matter cleanly, is to do it properly and admirably. For learners, noticing how often 綺麗 stretches from looks to cleanliness to a job well done offers a small but telling glimpse into the culture’s quiet esteem for orderliness.