First opened Sunday, May 31, 2009
台詞
せりふ
- 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).
speech, words, one's lines, remarks
An actor's lines may be a “calling out” — and the kanji came from a different, Chinese-derived word.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
In a sentence
それは私の台詞だよ！
That's my line!
それはこっちのセリフですよ。
That's what I want to say.
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.
- Hedged“Probably originally a compound of 競り (seri, “hawking, calling out in a loud voice”, the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) of verb 競る (seru), “to hawk, to call out in a loud voice”) + 言ふ (ifu, ancient spelling of modern 言う (iu), “to say”):”
- “: */seri ipu/ → */seripu/ → /seriɸu/ → /serifu/”
- Hedged“Alternatively, the final -fu may have come instead from 合ふ (afu), ancient form of modern 合う (au, “to do something together”) (thus, a doublet of 競り合う):”
- “: */seri apu/ → */seripu/ → /seriɸu/ → /serifu/”
- “The kanji spelling is from the synonymous Middle Chinese-derived daishi reading below.”
Source: Wiktionary: 台詞 (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 台詞 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not せりふ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
だいし
- “From Middle Chinese 臺詞 (MC doj zi). Uses the goon reading for the first character and the kan'on reading for the second character, suggesting either a pronunciation shift within Japanese, or influence from a Chinese dialect or later pronunciation.”
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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.