First opened Tuesday, April 13, 2010
氷
こおり
- 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).
ice, hail
Ice is a verb turned noun: kōri is the stem of 凍る (kōru, “to freeze”).
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 氷
In a sentence
氷が溶けている。
The ice is melting.
氷のように冷たい。
It's as cold as ice.
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.
- “⟨ko₂pori⟩ → */kəpori/ → /koɸori/ → /kowori/ → /koːri/”
- “From Old Japanese.”
- “The 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 凍(こお)る (kōru, “to freeze”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 氷 (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 氷 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not こおり. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ひ
- “⟨pi₁⟩ → */pʲi/ → /ɸi/ → /hi/”
- “From Old Japanese. Attested in the Man'yōshū of circa 759 CE.”
- “Possibly cognate with 冷える (hieru, “to become cold”).”
- “Compare Middle Chinese 冰 (MC ping).”
ひょう
- “From Middle Chinese 冰 (MC ping).”
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.