First opened Friday, June 1, 2012
玄人
くろうと
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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).
expert, professional
Kurōto is 玄 (kuro, “deep, profound”) plus 人 (-uto, “person”), an old root form of 人 (hito).
Taken apart
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In a sentence
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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.
- “*/kuroputo/ → */kurofuto/ → /kurouto/”
- “Compound of 玄(くろ) (kuro, “deep, profound”) + 人(うと) (-uto, “person”).”
- “The term 人 (hito, “person”) appears in various older compounds with a root form of 人 (*puto → *buto → *udo, *puto → *futo → *uto). This form is never seen in isolation, and it often undergoes further phonetic changes to combine with preceding vowels. Compare the formation of 仲人 (nakōdo), from naka + udo; 旅人 (tabiudo), from tabi + udo; 素人 (shirōto), from shiro + uto.”
Source: Wiktionary: 玄人 (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
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.