First opened Wednesday, July 29, 2009
オートバイ
オートバイ
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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).
motorcycle (lit: auto-bi(ke))
The “wasei-eigo” motorcycle is, Wiktionary says, actually a real English word.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
私はオートバイに乗りたい。
I want to ride a motorcycle.
オートバイに乗るのは楽しい。
It's fun to ride a motorcycle.
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 オートバイシクル (ōtobaishikuru), erroneously listed in some monolingual Japanese dictionaries as wasei eigo, but actually borrowed from English autobicycle, an early English term for motorcycle. See also autobike.”
- “First cited to a text from 1918.”
Source: Wiktionary: オートバイ (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
- 外来語 Loanword
- Words taken from a language other than Chinese, mostly European ones, usually written in katakana.
- Made in Japan
- Coined in Japan from foreign material (wasei-kango, wasei-eigo), not borrowed whole.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Clipping
- A longer word or phrase shortened in everyday use.