きり: Since/only/always/totally!

Introduction

Welcome! In this lesson, we have 「きり」 your new grammatical best friend, along with some compare and contrast with older friends like だけ and しか. It's okay, people, and grammar points, often grow apart over time. But that doesn't mean you can't catch up!

〜きり: The "cutting" of actions and verbs

As you may be able to tell from the title, きり is a powerful little piece of grammar. Let's start off with its origin story:

「きり」 is simply the stem form of 切きる ("to cut"), and we can use it to (grammatically) "cut off" actions or states.

So what exactly happens when we "cut" an action/state? Well, various things can happen when you slice into a piece of grammar, but luckily when it comes to きり, we can categorize the outcome into three main results.