Word.ws English Dictionary

shiro

shiro noun: a stew of Ethiopia and Eritrea origin whose primary ingredient is powdered chickpeas or broad-bean meal.

Noun (1)

shiro (uncountable)

  1. A stew of Ethiopia and Eritrea origin whose primary ingredient is powdered chickpeas or broad-bean meal.

Noun (2)

shiro (plural shiros)

  1. A mass of hyphae constituting the mycelium of certain fungi.
    • Another commonly used Japanese term in matsutake literature is "shiro". As a Japanese noun, it means castle or domain (fruiting place) of a mushroom. As an adjective, it means white. More specifically, a shiro is the dense mat of fungal filaments ("hyphae" or collectively "mycelium") that matsutake...1997, David Hosford, David Pilz, Randy Molina, Michael Amaranthus, Ecology and Management of the Commercially Harvested American Matsutake Mushroom, page 2
    • ‘Shiro’ refers to the dense mat of fungal filaments that Tricholoma Matsutake forms in soil in association with pine roots and soil particles. It is considered that the amount of mycelia in T. matsutake shiros is closely related to the amount of emerged T. matsutake fruiting body.2007 September 24, Lu-Min Vaario, “Can we regulate the growth of shiro?”, in Matsutake Workshop, archived from the original on 09 Jun 2022

Proper noun capitalized: Shiro

Shiro

  1. A male given name from Japanese.

Forms of shiro

pluralshiros

Origin of shiro

Possibly from Amharic or Tigrinya ሺሮ (širo, “chickpea flour”)

Of Japanese origin, either 城 (shiro, “castle”) or 白 (shiro, “white”) (see quotation below).

Borrowed from Japanese しろう (Shirō).

Questions about shiro

What does shiro mean?
Shiro means a stew of Ethiopia and Eritrea origin whose primary ingredient is powdered chickpeas or broad-bean meal.
What part of speech is shiro?
Shiro can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of shiro?
The plural of shiro is shiros.

Words near shiro in the dictionary

  1. Shirley Temple
  2. Shirley Temples
  3. shirling
  4. shirls
  5. shirmal
  6. shiro
  7. shiroboshi
  8. Shiroishi
  9. shirokshinite
  10. Shiroma
  11. Shiromas

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shiro (page history and authors); Shiro (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “shiro.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/shiro. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.