First opened Tuesday, March 14, 2006
叔母
おば
- 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).
aunt (younger than one's parent)
Oba, an aunt, is likely 小 (o-, “small, young”) plus 母 (ha, “mother”), as 叔父 (oji) is 小 plus 父.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “From Old Japanese. Attested in a text from 701. In turn, reconstructed as descending from Proto-Japonic *wonpa.”
- Hedged“Likely a compound of 小 (o-, “small, young”) + 母 (ha, “mother”). Compare 叔父 (oji, “uncle”), also likely from 小 (o-) + 父 (chi, “father”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 叔母 (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
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.