短い
みじかい
mijikai
= short (in length or duration); brief
短い (mijikai) is the Japanese word for ‘short’ — covering both physical length (a short skirt, a short pencil) and duration (a short vacation, a brief meeting) — and it’s one of those versatile adjectives that crops up in daily life more often than learners expect.
短い means ‘short’ in the sense of having little length or lasting a brief time. It is an i-adjective that conjugates to 短く (mijikaku) in adverbial form, 短くない (mijikaku nai) in the negative, and 短かった (mijikakatta) in the past. The word applies to physical objects (短い髪, mijikai kami, short hair), time periods (短い夏休み, mijikai natsuyasumi, a short summer vacation), and abstract extents (短い距離, mijikai kyori, a short distance). Its antonym is 長い (nagai, long). In casual speech, 短め (mijikame) means ‘on the shorter side’ — a useful suffix for requesting something slightly shorter without being absolute.
Don’t confuse 短い (mijikai, short in length/time) with 低い (hikui, low/short in height for people and structures). To say a person is short (in stature), use 背が低い (se ga hikui), never 背が短い. 短い is for length along a horizontal or temporal axis, not vertical height. Also note the five-syllable reading み・じ・か・い — learners sometimes mispronounce it as み・じ・か or miswrite it as みじかい with a long vowel.
短 combines 矢 (ya, arrow) and 豆 (mame, bean). The arrow sets a reference for straightness and measure; the bean represents something small and compact. Together the kanji evokes something measured and found wanting in length. It appears in 短所 (tansho, shortcoming/weak point — the ‘short place’), 短縮 (tanshuku, shortening/reduction), and 短期 (tanki, short-term). The antonym 長 (nagai, long/chief) is one of the most common contrasting kanji pairs at the N5 level.
Everyday use
彼女はいつも短いスカートを履いている。
Kanojo wa itsumo mijikai sukaato wo haite iru.
She always wears short skirts.
Formal / Cultural context
本日はお時間をいただきありがとうございます。短い時間ではありますが、よろしくお願いいたします。
Honjitsu wa ojikan wo itadaki arigatou gozaimasu. Mijikai jikan de wa arimasu ga, yoroshiku onegai itashimasu.
Thank you for your time today. It will be brief, but I appreciate your attention.
Casual / Social Media
夏休み短すぎる〜！もう終わったの嘘でしょ
Natsuyasumi mijikasugiru~! Mou owatta no uso desho
Summer break is way too short~! It can’t already be over
短い resonates in Japan’s seasons of intense cultural focus. The Japanese summer vacation (夏休み, natsuyasumi) for students is notoriously shorter than vacations in most Western countries — typically about six weeks for school children compared to two to three months in the US or Europe. The collective lament that 夏休みが短い (the summer break is short) is a perennial refrain on Japanese social media and a recurring theme in school anime, where the summer vacation episode arc is treasured precisely because everyone knows how quickly it ends.
In Japanese aesthetics, brevity and shortness are not necessarily negatives — the haiku (俳句) compresses entire emotional landscapes into 17 syllables, and the Japanese concept of 間 (ma, negative space and pause) treats the short gap as meaningful in itself. Short forms — the 短歌 (tanka, a 31-syllable poem), the short film, the brief seasonal menu at a restaurant — are celebrated for distilling experience to its essence. When 短い is applied to art or a meal, it can carry an elegiac quality: this experience is precious because it is short.