First opened Monday, March 30, 2009
表す
あらわす
- 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).
to express, to show
表す is derived as the verb form of 露 (arawa, “naked, bare; open, revealed”).
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 表
In a sentence
彼は怒気を顔に表した。
He looked black with anger.
言葉は思想をあらわす。
Words stand for ideas.
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.
- “Derived as the verb form of adjective 露(あらわ) (arawa, “naked, bare; open, revealed”), as a compound of 露(あらわ) (arawa) + す (-su, causativizing suffix; root of modern する (suru, “to do; to make something become”)), with an original meaning of “to make something open and public, to make something apparent”.”
Source: Wiktionary: 表す (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 表す on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not あらわす. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ひょうす
- “Derived from Middle Chinese 表 (MC pjiewX), as a compound of 表(ひょう) (hyō) + す (-su, causativizing or transitivizing suffix; root of modern する (suru, “to do; to make something become”)).”
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.