First opened Saturday, September 10, 2011
芝
しば
- 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).
lawn
Shiba is from Old Japanese, one of the oldest attested words in the language, used in the Man'yōshū and Nihon Shoki.
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 芝
In a sentence
芝は刈る必要がある。
The grass needs cutting.
公園の芝は青く美しい。
The grass in the park is green and beautiful.
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.
- “From Old Japanese. One of the oldest attested words in the Japanese language, used in the Man'yōshū and Nihon Shoki.”
- Hedged“This character usually means a type of fungus in Chinese. However, it was also used phonetically in 芝麻 (*chimæ, “sesame”) (modern Mandarin 芝麻 (zhīmá)), and it seems that the Japanese use of this character for the sense of grass may have come from this sesame sense in Chinese.”
Source: Wiktionary: 芝 (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 芝 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not しば. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
しざま
- “Compound of し (shi, adjectival ending) + 様 (sama, “kind, type”). The sama changes to zama as an instance of rendaku (連濁). The kanji 芝 was used as an ateji, probably based on its on'yomi of shi.”
し
- “From Middle Chinese 芝 (*chi). Compare modern Mandarin 芝 (zhī).”
しはざき・しばさき・しばざき・しばたか
- “Used as ateji in various surnames.”
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.