First opened Friday, December 10, 2010
青い
あおい
- 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).
blue
Aoi was Old Japanese awosi, from awo-, from Proto-Japonic *awo.
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 青
In a sentence
顔が青いよ。
You look pale.
彼の目は青い。
His eyes are blue.
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 あをし (awosi); from Old Japanese awo-, from Proto-Japonic *awo.”
- “⟨awosi⟩ (classical 終止形 (shūshikei) or terminal form) → ⟨awoki₁⟩ (classical 連体形 (rentaikei) or attributive form) → /aoi/ (modern shūshikei and rentaikei)”
Source: Wiktionary: 青い (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.