First opened Wednesday, October 26, 2005
大小
だいしょう
- 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).
size
Daishō is 大 (dai, “big, large”) plus 小 (shō, “small, little”): size as “big-small”.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
道路上の大小の石に気をつけなさい。
Watch out for big and small stones on the road!
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.
- “Compound of 大(だい) (dai, “big, large”) + 小(しょう) (shō, “small, little”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 大小 (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 大小 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not だいしょう. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
おおさ
- “Appears to be a compound of Old Japanese-derived 大(おお) (ō, “big”) + 小(さ) (sa, “small”, rare reading). Alternatively, may be 大(おお) (ō, “big”) + さ (-sa, suffix indicating degree or amount).”
- “Appears to be mostly obsolete in modern Japanese, superseded by the term 大(おお)きさ (ōkisa, “size”, literally “bigness”), from adjective 大(おお)きい (ōkii, “big”). A modern Japanese term with the same reading is 多(おお)さ (ōsa, literally “much-ness, many-ness”), from adjective 多(おお)い (ōi, “many, much”), deriving from the same Old Japanese root opo as 大(おお)きい (ōkii, “big”).”
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.