First opened Monday, March 17, 2008
嵐
あらし
- 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).
storm
Arashi has competing theories: 荒ら (ara, “desolate, sparse”) plus 風 (shi, “wind”), or the stem of 荒らす (arasu, “destroy, ruin”).
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 嵐
In a sentence
急にあらしになった。
The storm broke.
あらしの勢いが弱まった。
The storm abated.
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.
- “/arasi/ → /araɕi/”
- “From Old Japanese.”
- Hedged“Derivation theories include:”
- “* Compound of 荒ら (ara, “desolate, sparse”, archaic) + 風 (shi, “wind”, obsolete).”
- “* From 荒らし (arashi, “destroyer”), the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of verb 荒らす (arasu, “destroy, ruin”).”
- “* Apophonic form of 颪 (oroshi, “wind blowing down from the mountains”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 嵐 (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 嵐 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not あらし. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
らん
- “/ram/ → /ramʉ/ → /ran/”
- “From Middle Chinese 嵐 (MC lom).”
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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.