First opened Monday, January 24, 2011
青
あお
- 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).
blue
Ao may have been sawo before it was awo, but the source says the leading s is unclear.
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
信号は青だ。
The traffic signal is green.
赤信号が青に変った。
The light changed from red to green.
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.
- Hedged“/sawo/ (uncertain, may be compound as opposed to root) → /awo/ → /ao/”
- “From Old Japanese, ultimately from Proto-Japonic *awo.”
- Hedged“Appears as the latter part in older compounds with an -s- infix or prefix. It is unclear if this leading /s/ is indicative of an earlier form (sawo), or if this was an addition for euphony to avoid vowel clusters, or for other reasons. This /s/ is also seen in 雨(あめ) (ame, “rain”, becoming same in old compounds) and 稲(いね) (ine, “rice”, becoming shine in old compounds).”
Source: Wiktionary: 青 (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 青 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not あお. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
せい
- “From Middle Chinese 青 (MC tsheng).”
しい
- “Unknown. The reading might be an obscure term from Old Japanese or dialect. The use of the character 青 arises from its 宋音(そうおん) (sōon, “Song-dynasty pronunciation”).”
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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.