ecchi

Meanings

1. Of animation, erotic, lascivious, lewd, naughty, sexy, suggestive.

1. A genre, especially of anime and manga, featuring playful, tongue-in-cheek usage of sexualized scenes and situations such as double entendre or flirtation, while remaining non-pornographic. Often used to differentiate from hentai which features overt sexual themes.
2. A situation within a story, especially anime and manga, which ventures into the ecchi genre.

Etymology

From Japanese エッチ (etchi, “dirty; perverted”), which is derived from English aitch (“name of the letter ⟨H⟩”), which is an initialism of the romaji of Japanese 変(へん)態(たい) (hentai, “pervert”). エッチ (etchi) is not a genre in Japanese; this is a development in English (Pseudo-Japonism), similar to that of hentai from 変(へん)態(たい) (hentai, “pervert”) above.