First opened Monday, July 18, 2005
油断
ゆだん
- flat (heiban)
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).
negligence, unpreparedness
Yudan is “unclear, with multiple theories”, one drawing on the story of a pot of oil (油鉢) in the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
油断してはいけません。
You'd better stay on your guard.
罠かもしれん、油断するな。
It could be a trap; don't let your guard down.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- Hedged“Unclear, with multiple theories.”
- “* From the story of the 油鉢 (yuhatsu, “pot of oil”) in the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra (大般涅槃経); see 大般涅槃経#油断大敵.”
- “*:”
- “* Sound change from 寛(ゆた)に (yuta ni).”
- “* There is a lamp in Enryaku-ji (延暦寺) that has been alight since the time of Saichō (最澄), its founder, and 油断 (literally “oil + end”) refers to not letting it go out.”
- “The term is not understood in other parts of the Sinosphere.”
Source: Wiktionary: 油断 (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
- 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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.