First opened Tuesday, February 13, 2007
冗談
じょうだん
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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).
a joke
Jōdan is, by surface analysis, 冗 (jō, “superfluous”) plus 談 (dan, “talk”).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
冗談はやめて。
Get serious.
冗談でしょう。
You must be kidding!
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.
- “By surface analysis, 冗(じょう) (jō, “superfluous”) + 談(だん) (dan, “talk”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 冗談 (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.