First opened Thursday, July 30, 2009
赤ちゃん
あかちゃん
- 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).
baby, infant
A baby is “red” plus an affectionate suffix, from the colour of a newborn's skin.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Written with 赤
In a sentence
赤ちゃんは父親似だ。
The baby takes after its father.
赤ちゃんは寝ています。
The baby is sleeping.
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 赤 (aka, “red”) + ちゃん (-chan, familiarizing suffix).”
- “Compare 赤ん坊 (akanbō) and 赤子 (akago), both of which also allude to the reddish complexion of a newborn. Compare also the similar formation of Malay anak merah (literally “child + red”).”
- “First cited to a text from 1856 or 1857.”
Source: Wiktionary: 赤ちゃん (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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.