First opened Thursday, April 21, 2011
城
しろ
- flat (heiban)
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).
castle
Shiro's derivation is unknown; the reading first appears in 794 CE when 山背 (Yamashiro) was renamed 山城 by Emperor Kanmu.
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 城
In a sentence
あの城は美しい。
That castle is beautiful.
遠方に城が見えた。
We saw a castle in the distance.
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“Derivation unknown. The shiro reading for this character appears in 794 CE when the 山背 (Yamashiro) region was renamed 山城, by Emperor Kanmu, thus applying the shiro reading to the 城 kanji for the first time.”
Source: Wiktionary: 城 (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 城 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.
ぐすく
- “Borrowed from older Okinawan (Modern Okinawan 城 (gushiku)). The final ku may be cognate with mainland Japanese ki (see below).”
- “The initial gu may be cognate with 御 (go, “honorific”), but it is problematic in that the only honorary prefixes found in Omoro Sōshi are 御 (mi) and 御 (o). Suku may be related to しけ (shike, “a holy place”) or cognate with 塞 (soko, “fortress”). While written with the kanji for "castle", textual and cultural evidence suggests that the initial primary meaning was a holy place.”
き
- “ki₂: [kɨ] > [ki]”
- “From Old Japanese, from Baekje 己 (*kɨ, “walled settlement”).”
しき
- “Originally a compound of 石 (shi, “stone”) + 城 (ki, “castle, fortress”).”
じょう
- “/zjau/ → */ʑɔː/ → /d͡ʑoː/”
- “From Middle Chinese 城 (MC dzyeng). Compare Hokkien 城 (siâⁿ).”
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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.