First opened Monday, June 20, 2005
死
し
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
How to read it: a line over a kana means the voice is high there, and ↓ marks where it drops. A kana with no line is low. With no ↓ the pitch stays high to the end and does not drop even on a following particle (が, は).
death, decease
Shi, “death”, appears to be a conflation of Middle Chinese 死 with an Old Japanese root that sounded alike.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
Written with 死
In a sentence
９回２死満塁。
Bases loaded, two outs in the ninth inning.
彼女の死は事実だ。
That she is dead is certain.
Sentences are from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), picked by fixed rules from a dated export and shown unchanged. Nobody has reviewed them one by one.
What Wiktionary says
Quoted line by line from Wiktionary's Etymology section for this reading, taken from one dated dump so it can't change underneath us. Nothing below is paraphrased.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “/si/ → /ɕi/”
- Hedged“Appears to be a conflation of Middle Chinese 死 (MC sijX), with an Old Japanese root that happened to have a similar pronunciation to the Middle Chinese and was probably cognate with 去る (saru, “to go, to go away”). Compare modern Mandarin 死 (sǐ).”
- “In kanji compounds, this would be considered as on'yomi; but on its own, this could be considered as either on'yomi or kun'yomi.”
Source: Wiktionary: 死 (dump of 2026-09-02), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Reading, meaning and part of speech from JMdict, and kanji readings from KANJIDIC2 (EDRDG).
What the labels mean
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.