First opened Tuesday, November 15, 2005
衣食住
いしょくじゅう
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.
food, clothing and shelter
Ishokujū is 衣 (i, “clothing”), 食 (shoku, “food”) and 住 (jū, “shelter”).
Taken apart
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In a sentence
衣食住は生活の基本です。
Food, clothing and shelter are the basis of life.
子供は衣食住を親に依存している。
Children depend on their parents for food, clothing and shelter.
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 衣(い) (i, “clothing”) + 食(しょく) (shoku, “food”) + 住(じゅう) (jū, “shelter”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 衣食住 (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.