日曜日

Taken apart

1. 日曜

   にちよう

   Sun

2. +

3. 日

   び (from ひ)

   day

Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.

Written with 日曜

In a sentence

• 日曜日(にちようび)に会(あ)おう。

  Let's meet on Sunday.

  Tatoeba #122156, translation #281815

• 今日(きょう)は日曜日(にちようび)だ。

  Today is Sunday.

  Tatoeba #171522, translation #63119

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.

• “Compound of 日曜 (nichiyō, “Sun”, in reference also to the day for that celestial body, as originally imported from Chinese astrology in the Heian period) + 日 (hi, “day”).”
• “The compound form suffixed with 日 (hi, “day”) first appears in 1826 and enters common use from the Meiji period with the promulgation of the Gregorian calendar.”

Source: Wiktionary: 日曜日 (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

混種語 Hybrid

Words that mix layers, e.g. a native part with a Chinese one.

Compound

Two or more words or stems joined into one.

Rendaku

The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).

Borrowing

Taken over from another language.