First opened Tuesday, September 14, 2010
色
いろ
- 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).
color
Iro was first attested in the Nihon Shoki meaning “color”, with the romance senses appearing from the 900s.
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 色
In a sentence
虹は７色だ。
The rainbow has seven colors.
彼女は色が黒い。
She is dark-skinned.
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.
- “⟨iro₂⟩ → */irə/ → /iro/”
- “From Old Japanese.”
- Hedged“First attested in the Nihon Shoki with the meaning of color. Senses referring to a person's emotions also appear quite early on. The romance or sex senses appear from the 900s, apparently an influence from Chinese usage, and roughly comparable to the euphemistic usage of English colorful.”
Source: Wiktionary: 色 (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 色 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not いろ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
いろえ
- “⟨iro₂pe₂⟩ → */irəpəj/ → /irofe/ → /iroe/”
- “Nominalization of the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) of classical shimo nidan katsuyō verb 色う (irou, “to color something”).”
- “Not used in modern Japanese.”
しき
- “From Middle Chinese 色 (MC srik). The goon reading, so likely the initial borrowing.”
- “The Buddhist sense is translation of Sanskrit रूप (rūpa, “outward appearance, color, form, shape”).”
しょく
- “From Middle Chinese 色 (MC srik). The kan'on reading, so likely a later borrowing.”
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.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.