First opened Saturday, August 25, 2007
坊や
ぼうや
- 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).
boy
Bōya is 坊 (bō, “boy”) plus や (ya, interjectory particle); its resemblance to English boy is coincidental.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Written with 坊
In a sentence
あっちへ行きな、ぼうや。
Out of my way, boy.
坊や、おかあさんは何処だい？
Where is your mother, boy?
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 坊(ぼう) (bō, “boy”) + や (ya, interjectory particle). Compare 婆(ばあ)や (bāya), 爺(じい)や (jīya), 姉(ねえ)や (nēya). Resemblance to English boy is coincidental.”
Source: Wiktionary: 坊や (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.