真っ黒
Meaning in Englishpitch black
Animated kanji stroke order
Word context
What it means
It means completely black. It acts as an intensifying color prefix that makes a color appear absolute and uniform; used in everyday speech and descriptive writing to emphasize darkness or absence of color.
Main meanings
- Literal color meaning: pitch black or jet black, with uniform darkness.
- Emphatic intensifier: describes a shade that is completely black, leaving no lighter tones.
- Figurative use: can describe darkness, gloom, or a stark contrast in non-literal contexts.
How to use it
Used in casual and semi-formal contexts to describe colors or lighting of scenes; common in visual media and literature; when modifying a noun, it typically takes the form 真っ黒の + noun and as a predicate 真っ黒だ; appropriate for describing a highly uniform, dark appearance.
Variants and close terms
- 漆黒 (shikkoku) — deep black (shikkoku)
- 黒々とした (kokuro to shita) — jet-black, very dark (kurokuro to shita)
- 真っ白 (masshiro) — antonym indicating pure white (masshiro)
Composition
- 真: true, real; used as an intensifier to form 真っ- before color words
- 黒: black; the color itself
Etymology
真 real, true; used here as an intensifier prefix before color words to mean completely; っ small tsu indicating abrupt consonant doubling; 黒 black; together they form the emphatic color term makkuro meaning completely black.
Word class
adjective (na-adjective)