First opened Sunday, October 28, 2007
さようなら
さようなら
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.
good-bye
Sayōnara is shortened from 左様ならば (sayō naraba), literally “if that's the way it is”.
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.
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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.
- “Shortening of earlier 左(さ)様(よう)ならば (sayō naraba), itself a compound of 左(さ)様(よう) (sayō, “like that, that way”) + ならば (naraba, “if”, now somewhat archaic, often replaced by なら (nara)). Literally, “if that's the way it is”.”
- “First cited to roughly 1742 as a conjunction (Literally, “if it's like that, then...”). The interjection usage is cited to 1788, and then the noun sense is cited to roughly 1915.”
Source: Wiktionary: さようなら (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
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Clipping
- A longer word or phrase shortened in everyday use.