First opened Tuesday, June 22, 2010
後ろ
うしろ
- 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).
back, behind, rear
Ushiro may be from us- (“lost; gone”) plus a locative suffix, but the ultimate derivation is unknown.
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.
Written with 後
In a sentence
後ろを見ろ。
Look back!
彼の後ろにいる。
I'm behind him.
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.
- “From Old Japanese. Appears in the Kojiki of 712 CE. Also cited to a portion of the Shoku Nihongi dated to 781, with the phonetic spelling 宇志呂 (usiro₂). In turn, from Proto-Japonic *osirə. Cognate with Hachijō おしろ (oshiro).”
- Hedged“Ultimate derivation unknown. Might be from stem us- ("lost; gone, out of sight", as in 失う (ushinau, “to lose”), older verb 失す (usu, “to lose; to go away”)) + locative suffix -ro₂ indicating an interior (as in 所 (tokoro, “place”), 空ろ・虚ろ (utsuro, “emptiness, a hollow”), 洞・空・虚 (uro, “a hollow space in something”), 室 (muro, “room; cave”), possibly 心 (kokoro, “heart”)). The earliest sense of "somewhere out of sight" also suggests a connection with stem us-.”
Source: Wiktionary: 後ろ (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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.