First opened Sunday, July 11, 2010
白い
しろい
- 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).
white
Shiroi was shiroshi, and its medial k went through voicing, spirantization and gliding until it disappeared.
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 白
In a sentence
白いですか。
Is it white?
私の犬は白い。
My dog is white.
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.
- “Modern form of Old Japanese adjective しろし (shiroshi).”
- “⟨siro₁si⟩ (classical 終止形 (shūshikei) or terminal form) → ⟨siro₁ki₁⟩ (classical 連体形 (rentaikei) or attributive form) → /siroi/ (modern shūshikei and rentaikei)”
- “An intervocalic sound-change caused the medial plosive /-k-/ to undergo voicing, then spirantization, then gliding, then being dropped, before /-i, -u, -e, -o/ (Hamano, 2000).”
- “⟨siro₁ki₁⟩ → */sirʷokʲi/ → */sirʷogʲi/ → */sirʷoɣi/ → */sirʷoji/ → /siroi/ → [ɕiɾo̞i].”
Source: Wiktionary: 白い (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.