wabi
wabi noun: a quality of simple or solitary beauty, especially as expressed in various forms of Japanese art or culture.
Noun (1)
wabi (uncountable)
- A quality of simple or solitary beauty, especially as expressed in various forms of Japanese art or culture.
- A lamp here, table, bookcase, print on the wall. The incredible Japanese sense of wabi.1962, Philip K. Dick, “The Man in the High Castle”, in Four Novels of the 1960s, Library of America, published 2007, page 94
- One of these changes would be the further refinement of the concept of wabi as an aesthetic ideal, and that was to be the work of Takeno Jōō, under whom the Way of Tea would mature.1998, Sen Sōshitsu XV, translated by V. Dixon Morris, The Japanese Way of Tea, page 146
Noun (2) capitalized: Wabi
Wabi pl (plural only)
Synonyms of wabi
Origin of wabi
From Japanese 侘び.
Questions about wabi
- What does wabi mean?
- Wabi means a quality of simple or solitary beauty, especially as expressed in various forms of Japanese art or culture.
- What part of speech is wabi?
- Wabi is a noun.
Words near wabi in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: wabi (page history and authors); Wabi (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: “wabi.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wabi. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.