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First opened Sunday, July 23, 2006

対照

たいしょう

  • flat (heiban)

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).

contrast, antithesis, comparison

JLPT N3Commonnoun (common) (futsuumeishi)noun or participle which takes the aux. verb surutransitive verb漢語 · Sino-JapaneseCompound

Taishō is 対 (tai, “place in opposition and compare”) plus 照 (shō, “check one thing against another”).

Taken apart

  1. 対

    たい

    place in opposition and compare

  2. 照

    しょう

    check one thing against another

Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.

Written with 対照

In a sentence

  • 赤(あか)は青(あお)と美(うつく)しい対照(たいしょう)をなす。

    Red contrasts well with blue.

    Tatoeba #142220, translation #272350

  • その二(ふた)つの考(かんが)えの対照(たいしょう)は非常(ひじょう)に際立(きわだ)っている。

    The contrast between the two ideas is very marked.

    Tatoeba #207391, translation #44643

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.

  • “From 対(たい) (tai, “place in opposition and compare”) + 照(しょう) (shō, “check one thing against another”).”

Source: Wiktionary: 対照 (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

漢語 Sino-Japanese
Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.
Compound
Two or more words or stems joined into one.

Also read たいしょう

Other words so far with exactly this reading and another spelling, oldest first, with the pitch accent each entry shows: where they differ, the pitch tells the words apart in speech. Only the readings are compared; nothing is claimed about how the words are related.

  • 対照This word

    contrast, antithesis, comparison

    たいしょう flat (heiban)

  • 対象

    target; object (of worship, study, etc.); subject (i.e., of taxation)

    たいしょう flat (heiban)

More like this

Other words so far that share a part, a process or a layer with this one, closest first. Each tag says what is shared; nothing here is a claim beyond what the entries already show.

Also opened on July 23

The words that opened on this day of the year in other years, oldest first. They share only the date: nothing else links them.

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Origins quoted from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Kaikki.org; meanings & kanji from JMdict, KANJIDIC2 & KRADFILE (EDRDG, CC BY-SA 4.0) — how we check it