First opened Saturday, August 1, 2009
便所
べんじょ
- tail-high (odaka): 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).
toilet, lavatory
The toilet is the “place of convenience” — a coinage that Wiktionary dates to the late 1400s.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
生徒はこの便所を使ってはならない。
Students must not use this toilet.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- Hedged“Appears to be a coinage in Japanese from Middle Chinese-derived roots, as a compound of 便 (ben, “convenience, ease”, also meaning “bodily waste; bowel movement”) + 所 (sho, “place”). The sho changes to jo as an instance of rendaku (連濁). Compare English expressions seat of ease, house of ease, also pooper, shitter.”
- “First cited in works from the late 1400s.”
Source: Wiktionary: 便所 (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
- 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.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.