First opened Sunday, October 23, 2011
赤字
あかじ
- 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).
deficit, go in the red
Akaji is 赤 (aka, “red”) plus 字 (ji, “characters”), and its “deficit” sense, attested since the Taishō period, comes from marking negative sums in red ink.
Taken apart
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In a sentence
商売は赤字だ。
The business is in the red.
同社は赤字である。
The company is in deficit.
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.
- “From 赤(あか) (aka, “red”) + 字(じ) (ji, “characters”). The “deficit” sense, attested since the Taishō period, relates to the tradition of indicating negative sums in a ledger with red ink. Compare English in the red.”
Source: Wiktionary: 赤字 (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
- 混種語 Hybrid
- Words that mix layers, e.g. a native part with a Chinese one.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.