First opened Sunday, August 16, 2009
女の子
おんなのこ
- 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).
girl
A girl is a “female child” — with a second, rarer name built on another word for “woman”.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
エミはよい女の子だ。
Emi is a good girl.
健は女の子に親切です。
Ken is kind to the girls.
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 女 (onna, “a woman; female”) + の (no, appositional particle) + 子 (ko, “a child”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 女の子 (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).
Other readings of 女の子 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not おんなのこ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
めのこ
- “Compound of 女 (me, “a woman; female”) + の (no, appositional particle) + 子 (ko, “a child”).”
- “Less commonly used than onnanoko above.”
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.