First opened Wednesday, June 17, 2009
少女
しょうじょ
- 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).
young girl
In its older native reading, “young girl” was “little” plus “female” — much as the word for “man” began as “young boy”.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Wiktionary's text doesn't split this word, so each part is one of its kanji (with the okurigana written after it), with the reading and the dictionary meaning KANJIDIC2 gives that character — a word doesn't always use every sense of its kanji.
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.
- “From Middle Chinese compound 少女 (MC syewX|syewH nrjoX|nrjoH). Compare modern Mandarin 少女 (shàonǚ).”
Source: Wiktionary: 少女 (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 少女 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not しょうじょ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
おとめ
- “From Old Japanese. Originally a compound of 乙 (oto, “young, little”) + 女 (me, “female, girl”). Compare 男 (otoko, “man”), originally meaning "young boy".”
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.