First opened Wednesday, January 12, 2011
黒
くろ
- 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).
black
Kuro belongs to a root *kur that also reaches 暗い (kurai, “dark”) and 蔵 (kura).
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 黒
In a sentence
この黒板は黒でなく緑だ。
This blackboard is not black, but green.
犬は白と黒との区別がつく。
The dog knows black from 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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “⟨kuro₁⟩ → /kuro/”
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *kuro. See also 黒(くろ)い (kuroi).”
- “Via root morpheme *kur, cognates include:”
- “* 涅(くり) (kuri, “black mud from the bed of a body of water”).”
- “* 暗(くら) (kura, “darkness, deception”), 蔵(くら), 倉(くら), 庫(くら) (kura, “(dark) storehouse”), and 暗(くら)い (kurai, “dark”).”
- “* classical verb 暮(く)る (kuru), modern 暮(く)れる (kureru, “to become dark; to near the end (of a day, year, life, etc.)”), 暗(く)れる, 眩(く)れる (kureru, “to become depressed, to become dreary of mood”), 暮(く)れ (kure, “dusk, nightfall, sunset”), and 呉(くれ) (kure, “China”, literally “land of the setting sun”).”
- Hedged“Possibly also cognate with Ainu kur (“shadow”) and Korean 구름 (gureum, “cloud”); compare also Japanese 雲(くも) (kumo, “cloud”), Korean 검— (geom-, “black”), and Ainu kunne (“black; dark”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 黒 (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.