First opened Sunday, October 22, 2006
自動車
じどうしゃ
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.
automobile
Jidōsha is 自動 (jidō, “automatic movement”) plus 車 (-sha, “vehicle”).
Taken apart
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In a sentence
自動車は左折した。
The car made a turn to the left.
自動車が正面衝突した。
The cars collided head on.
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.
- “From 自動(じどう) (jidō, “automatic movement”) + 車(しゃ) (-sha, “vehicle”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 自動車 (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.