First opened Wednesday, May 13, 2009
洒落
しゃれ
- 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).
joke, pun, witticism
A pun or witticism is the stem of a verb for “stylish” — spelled with kanji that were fitted to the sound.
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.
In a sentence
私たちはその教授が昔から言っているしゃれにうんざりしている。
We are tired of the professor's old joke.
非常にうまい洒落だったので、満場爆笑した。
It was such a nice joke that everybody burst out laughing.
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 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 洒(しゃ)落(れ)る (shareru, “to be witty; to be stylish or dapper”). The spelling is an example of phonetic ateji (当(あ)て字(じ)), ultimately from Chinese 灑落 /洒落 (sǎluò, “confident and at ease; natural and elegant”).”
- “First cited to the late 1600s.”
Source: Wiktionary: 洒落 (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 洒落 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not しゃれ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
しゃら
- “Appears to be a shift from sharaku.”
- “First cited in the 1620s.”
- “This reading appears to be archaic, possibly obsolete.”
しゃらく
- “Ultimately from Middle Chinese 灑落 (MC sraeX lak, “confident and at ease; natural and elegant”).”
- “First cited to 1520. Given the dates of first appearance, sharaku may have been the original reading. An 1876 dictionary of word readings lists sharaku as an alternative for share.”
What the labels mean
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.