First opened Sunday, August 8, 2010
石
いし
- 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).
stone
Ishi is likely cognate with 磯 (iso, “pebble; gravel; rocky beach”).
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 石
In a sentence
点滴石を穿つ。
Constant dripping wears away a stone.
石は浮かない。
A stone does not float.
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.
- “⟨isi⟩ → /iɕi/”
- “From Old Japanese. First cited in the Man'yōshū of 759. In turn, the Old Japanese is reconstructed as from Proto-Japonic *isoi.”
- Hedged“Likely cognate with 磯(いそ) (iso, “pebble; gravel; rocky beach”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 石 (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 石 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not いし. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
こく
- “From Middle Chinese 斛 (MC huwk).”
- “The 石 spelling came about through customary use in Japan of this character for the unit of measure.”
せき
- “From Middle Chinese 石 (MC dzyek).”
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.