First opened Wednesday, August 2, 2006
正
せい
- 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).
(logical) true, regular
Sei, “true”, is from Middle Chinese 正, the kan'on reading, so likely not as old as the shō reading.
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 正
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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 Middle Chinese 正 (MC tsyeng|tsyengH). The kan'on reading, so likely not as old as the shō reading.”
Source: Wiktionary: 正 (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 正 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not せい. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
しょう
- “From Middle Chinese 正 (MC tsyeng|tsyengH). The goon reading, so likely older than the sei reading.”
ただす
- “Derived from the verb 正す (tadasu, “to correct”).”
ただし・たゞし
- “Derived from the nominal form 正し (tadashi, “correcting”) of the verb 正す (tadasu, “to correct”).”
まさ
- “First attested in the early 800s.”
- “Speculatively, may be an ancient resultative noun derived from verb 増す (masu, “to increase; to excel, to be excellent; to stand out, to be outstanding”).”
まさし
- “Derived from the classical terminal form masashi of modern adjective 正しい (masashii, “true, real, certain”).”
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.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.