First opened Friday, September 23, 2005
尻
しり
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 2
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).
buttocks, bottom
Shiri is from Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *siri, and its ultimate derivation is unknown.
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 尻
In a sentence
頭隠して尻隠さず。
Protect yourself at all points.
やめなさい、お尻をぶちますよ。
Stop that, or I'll fix your wagon.
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.
- Hedged“From Old Japanese, in turn from Proto-Japonic *siri. Ultimate derivation unknown.”
- Hedged“The use as a suffixing element in surnames is of unclear derivation. Many of these surnames may derive from place names, in which case the "behind, the end" sense may be the origin. However, other surnames have no clear geographic derivation.”
- “From Ainu シㇼ (sir, “place, land, island”). The kanji spelling is an example of ateji.”
Source: Wiktionary: 尻 (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).
Other readings of 尻 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not しり. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
いさらい
- “wisarapi > wisaraɸi > wisarawi > isarai.”
What the labels mean
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.