First opened Friday, May 5, 2006
漁師
りょうし
- 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).
fisherman
Ryōshi “should” be gyoshi: the ryō comes from confusion with 猟, which means hunting.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
漁師は釣り糸を水中に投げた。
The fisherman cast his line into the water.
その漁師達は網を海に投げた。
The fishermen cast their nets into the sea.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- Hedged“The spelling is likely from Middle Chinese compound 漁師 /渔师 (ngjo srij, literally “fishing + master”). Compare modern Mandarin 漁師 /渔师 (yúshī, “fisherman”).”
- “The expected reading would be gyoshi. The kan'yōyomi (irregular but customary reading) ryō for the character 漁 is from confusion with 猟, whose most common on reading is ryō and means hunting, as used in the homophonic term 猟(りょう)師(し) (ryōshi, “hunter”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 漁師 (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.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.