First opened Saturday, February 11, 2006
真っ青
まっさお
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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).
deep blue, ghastly pale
Massao is older 真青 (masao) with a doubled consonant for emphasis, first cited in the Nippo Jisho of 1603.
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.
In a sentence
彼はその知らせを聴いてまっさおになった。
He turned pale at the news.
彼の顔は真っ青になった。
His face turned white.
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.
- “Shift in pronunciation from older 真青 (masao), with gemination as an excrescence to express emphasis. First cited to the Nippo Jisho of 1603.”
Source: Wiktionary: 真っ青 (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.