First opened Friday, December 21, 2007
アルコール
アルコール
- 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).
alcohol
Arukōru began as arukohoru, borrowed from Dutch alcohol with a phonetic kanji spelling.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
彼はアルコールを一切飲まない。
He never drinks alcohol.
アルコール類は控えてください。
Don't drink any alcohol.
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.
- “/arukohoru/ → /arukoːru/”
- Hedged“Borrowed from Dutch alcohol, initially borrowed and pronounced as アルコホル (arukohoru) with evidence of a phonetic kanji spelling as 亜(あ)爾(る)箇(こ)保(ほ)児(る) (arukohoru). The medial /h/ appears to have fallen out due to historical kana orthography-induced spelling pronunciation (ho→wo→o), in the manner of the evolution of 凍(こほ)る (kōru). Compare French alcool, Italian alcol, Portuguese álcool, where Romance languages also lost the medial /h/.”
Source: Wiktionary: アルコール (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
- 外来語 Loanword
- Words taken from a language other than Chinese, mostly European ones, usually written in katakana.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.