First opened Wednesday, August 12, 2009
弁当
べんとう
- 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).
box lunch
The bentō was probably a “face tub” — and the 弁 was picked to avoid another character's meaning.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
In a sentence
駅で弁当を買った。
I bought a box lunch at the station.
暖かい弁当が買える。
We can buy hot lunches.
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.
- “/bentau/ → /bentɔː/ → /bentoː/.”
- Hedged“Probably a variant of 面(めん)筒(とう) (mentō, “(obsolete) tub for distributing portions of food”), from 面(めん) (men, “face”) + 筒(とう) (tō, “bucket, tub”) (originally referring to a tub for washing the face), both from Middle Chinese.”
- “The use of 弁 for ben is an example of phonetic ateji (当(あ)て字(じ)), due to 便 having another sense of “human excrement”.”
- “Shift from 弁(べん)当(とう) (bentō) above, shortening the vowel.”
Source: Wiktionary: 弁当 (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.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Clipping
- A longer word or phrase shortened in everyday use.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.