shiro

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

shiro (uncountable)

1. An East African stew whose primary ingredient is powdered chickpeas or broad bean meal.

Uncertain, but some sources link the word to Japanese 城 (shiro, “castle”) or 白 (shiro, “white”) (see quotation below).

shiro (plural shiros)

1. A mass of hyphae constituting the mycelium of certain fungi.
   • 1997, David Hosford, David Pilz, Randy Molina, and Michael Amaranthus, Ecology and Management of the Commercially Harvested American Matsutake Mushroom‎, page 2:

     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 species form in the soil.

   • 2007 September 24, Lu-Min Vaario, “Can we regulate the growth of shiro?”, in Matsutake Workshop‎:

     ‘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.

• horis

shiro

1. Rōmaji transcription of しろ