First opened Tuesday, August 30, 2005
お弁当
おべんとう
Pitch accent: We don't have the data for this section. No accent list gives this spelling and reading, or the two we check against disagree.
a boxed lunch
Obentō is 御 (o-, honorific prefix) plus 弁当 (bentō, “bento”).
Taken apart
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In a sentence
普通のお弁当にしてね。
Make it a normal packed lunch, OK?
お弁当食べたんでしょう。
You have eaten lunch, haven't you?
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.
- “御(お) (o-, honorific prefix) + 弁(べん)当(とう) (bentō, “bento”).”
Source: Wiktionary: お弁当 (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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.