First opened Monday, August 10, 2009
素人
しろうと
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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).
layman, amateur, novice
An amateur is a “plain person” — and the “person” part is a form of 人 that never stands on its own.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
彼はしろうとの庭師だが、彼の育てる花は美しい。
He is an amateur gardener, but his flowers are beautiful.
あのシロウト歌手は文句なくタレントショーで一位となった。
The amateur singer won first in the talent show hands down.
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.
- “Compound of 素(しろ) (shiro, “plain, undecorated”) + 人(うと) (-uto, “person”).”
- “The term 人 (hito, “person”) appears in various older compounds with a root form of 人 (*puto → *buto → *udo, *puto → *futo → *uto). This form is never seen in isolation, and it often undergoes further phonetic changes to combine with preceding vowels. Compare the formation of 仲人 (nakōdo), from naka + udo; 旅人 (tabiudo), from tabi + udo.”
Source: Wiktionary: 素人 (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
- 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.