First opened Sunday, March 14, 2010
霜
しも
- tail-high (odaka): 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).
frost
Frost may be the “low” word: shimo is thought to be cognate with, or derived from, 下 (“bottom, lower part”).
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 霜
In a sentence
霜で花が傷んだ。
Frost touched the flowers.
ゆうべ霜が降りた。
It frosted last night.
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.
- “⟨simo₁⟩ → /simo/ → /ɕimo/”
- “From Old Japanese, first attested in the Harima Fudoki of 715 CE, in turn from Proto-Japonic *simo.”
- “Thought to be cognate with or derived from 下(しも) (⟨simo₁⟩ → shimo, “bottom, lower part”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 霜 (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
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.