First opened Friday, October 29, 2010
白
しろ
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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
Shiro is the standalone apophonic form of shira, from Proto-Japonic *siro.
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
紺屋の白袴。
The dyer wears 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.
- “⟨siro₁⟩ → */sirʷo/ → /ɕiro/”
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *siro.”
- “The standalone apophonic form of shira below.”
Source: Wiktionary: 白 (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 白 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not しろ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
しら
- “⟨sira⟩ → /ɕira/”
- “From Old Japanese. The 被(ひ)覆(ふく)形(けい) (hifukukei, “bound form”) of 白(しろ) (shiro), mostly used in compounds.”
はく・びゃく
- “From Middle Chinese 白 (MC baek).”
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.