限りだ【かぎりだ】

限りだ goes after a word for a feeling and says the feeling is as strong as it gets: "I couldn't be happier", "it's terribly sad". An い-adjective takes it directly, and a な-adjective takes な in between.

A few nouns of feeling take の instead: こうえい光栄のかぎり限り, "the greatest honour".

Feelings only

The adjective has to say how the speaker feels – glad, lonely, envious, grateful, ashamed. An adjective for a size, a price or a colour can't take 限りだ: ×大きい限りだ, ×高い限りだ. The feeling is also the speaker's own, so the sentence reports how you feel about something, not how someone else feels.

• × この建物は大きい限りだ → この建物はとても大きい

限りだ or てたまらない

限りだ is stiff and states the feeling calmly, which is why it turns up in speeches, thank-you letters, apologies and formal writing. てたまらない says a feeling is too strong to hold back, and it is at home in conversation, as is a plain ほんとうに本当にうれしい嬉しい.