First opened Saturday, January 16, 2010
真っ赤
まっか
- tail-high (odaka): 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).
deep red, flushed (of face)
“Pure red” — a prefix that means “true”, glued to あか.
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
彼女の顔は突然まっかになった。
Her face turned red suddenly.
そいつは真っ赤なうそだ。
That's a blessed lie.
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 真(ま)っ (ma'-, “true, pure”) + 赤(あか) (aka, “red”).”
- “First cited to the mid-1400s.”
- “The outright sense arose from the way that something purely red is obvious and clearly visible.”
Source: Wiktionary: 真っ赤 (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.