First opened Thursday, May 8, 2008
女王
じょおう
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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).
queen
Joō is Middle Chinese 女王, literally “female + king”.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
エリザベス２世は、イギリスの女王です。
Elizabeth II is the Queen of England.
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 Middle Chinese 女王 (nrjo^X hjwang, literally “female + king”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 女王 (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).
Other readings of 女王 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not じょおう. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
じょうおう
- “Alteration of joō.”
にょおう
- “From Middle Chinese 女王 (nrjo^X hjwang, literally “female + king”). The goon reading, so likely the initial borrowing.”
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.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.