勿体ない (mottainai)
too good, more than one deserves, wasteful, sacrilegious, unworthy of
- JLPT N1
- Pitch 5
Meaning
勿体ない (もったいない, mottainai) is a JLPT N1 vocabulary word meaning “too good, more than one deserves, wasteful, sacrilegious, unworthy of”.
Kanji in this word
Example sentences 3
食べ物を残してはもったいないわよ。
It's wasteful to leave food.
その言葉は私には勿体無いくらいです。
I'm not worthy of those words.
戦前に、鏡開きのときにできる餅屑を勿体無いと考えた茶商が、これを炒って茶葉に混ぜたのが始まりとされている。
In prewar times, a chasho (tea dealer), who found the scraps of mochi left after the kagamibiraki (the custom of cutting and eating a large, round rice cake, which has been offered to the gods at New Year, on January 11) wasteful, roasted and mixed them with tea leaves, and this was said to be the beginning of genmaicha.