First opened Wednesday, November 30, 2005
小母さん
おばさん
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.
lady, woman, ma'am
Obasan is 小 (o, “small” or “little”) plus 母 (ba, “mother”) plus さん (san, honorific suffix).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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.
- “From 小 (o, “small” or “little”) + 母 (ba, “mother”) + さん (san, honorific suffix)”
Source: Wiktionary: 小母さん (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
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.