First opened Tuesday, September 4, 2007
僧
そう
- 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).
monk, priest
Sō is a clipping of 僧伽 (sōgya), borrowed from Sanskrit saṃgha.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
Written with 僧
In a sentence
その僧は子供たちの遊びに参加した。
The priest participated in the children's game.
その僧は子供達の遊びに仲間入りした。
The priest participated in the children's games.
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.
- “Clipping of 僧伽 (sōgya), borrowed from Sanskrit संघ (saṃgha).”
Source: Wiktionary: 僧 (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.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Clipping
- A longer word or phrase shortened in everyday use.