First opened Friday, July 8, 2005
小
しょう
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
small
Shō as a suffix is a clipping of 小学校 (shōgakkō).
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
Written with 小
In a sentence
大か、小か。
Large or small?
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.
- “/seu/ → /ɕeu/ → /ɕoː/”
- “From Middle Chinese 小 (MC sjewX).”
- “The suffix sense is a clipping of 小学校 (shōgakkō, “elementary school”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 小 (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).
Other readings of 小 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not しょう. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
こ
- “/ko₁/ → /ko/”
- “From the Old Japanese stem こ (ko-). Cognate with 子 (ko, “child”).”
お
- “/wo/ → /o/”
- “From the Old Japanese stem を (wo-), modern お (o-).”
ささ・さざ
- “From the Old Japanese stem ささ (sasa-), found in terms such as 笹 (sasa, “bamboo grass”), 囁く (sasayaku, “to whisper”), and 些か (isasaka, “a little”), all related to small or slight.”
- “Saza appears to be a later derivation from sasa.”
What the labels mean
- 漢語 Sino-Japanese
- Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Clipping
- A longer word or phrase shortened in everyday use.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.