Word.ws English Dictionary

hanahaki

hanahaki noun: a fictional illness in which a person bearing an unrequited love coughs up flower petals until they die or their feelings are reciprocated. The disease can also be cured by a surgical procedure that removes the flowers, but this will result in them losing their feelings of affection and all memories of the person they loved.

Noun

hanahaki (uncountable)

  1. (Japanese) A fictional illness in which a person bearing an unrequited love coughs up flower petals until they die or their feelings are reciprocated. The disease can also be cured by a surgical procedure that removes the flowers, but this will result in them losing their feelings of affection and all memories of the person they loved.
    • The cascading emotions are
      giving me hanahaki tonight, they're
      beautiful but it's suffocating.2019, Unzila Iftikhar, Before Your Eyes - Despite It All, You Still Rise, page 9
    • It is familiar. In that most everyone is familiar with a coffee shop and thus understands the AU’s basic premise on sight. Unlike, say, Hanahaki fics.2020, Katharine Elizabeth McCain, "Today Your Barista Is: Genre Characteristics in The Coffee Shop Alternate Universe", dissertation submitted to Ohio State University, page 27

Origin of hanahaki

From Japanese 花吐き病 (hanahaki-byō), from 花 (hana, “flower”) + 吐く (haku, “to vomit”). An invention of Matsuda Naoko (松田奈緒子) for her manga Hanahaki Otome (『花吐き乙女』).

Questions about hanahaki

What does hanahaki mean?
Hanahaki means a fictional illness in which a person bearing an unrequited love coughs up flower petals until they die or their feelings are reciprocated. The disease can also be cured by a surgical procedure that removes the flowers, but this will result in them losing their feelings of affection and all memories of the person they loved.
What part of speech is hanahaki?
Hanahaki is a noun.

Words near hanahaki in the dictionary

  1. hanafize
  2. hanafized
  3. hanafizes
  4. hanafizing
  5. hanafuda
  6. hanahaki
  7. Hanahoe
  8. hanai
  9. Hanak
  10. Hanakian
  11. Hanakians

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hanahaki (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “hanahaki.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hanahaki. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.