First opened Monday, August 17, 2009
職場
しょくば
- flat (heiban)
- 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).
workplace
A workplace mixes a Chinese-derived “job” with a native-sounding “place” — a clue that it was coined in Japan.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
彼は職場でまだ仕事中だ。
He is still at work in the workroom.
職場に出てもいいですか。
Can I go to work?
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“Given the mixed Sinitic-Japanese reading, probably coined in Japan as a compound of 職 (shoku, “employment, trade, job”, on'yomi, from Middle Chinese) + 場 (ba, “place, site”, kun'yomi, from Old Japanese).”
Source: Wiktionary: 職場 (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
- 混種語 Hybrid
- Words that mix layers, e.g. a native part with a Chinese one.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Made in Japan
- Coined in Japan from foreign material (wasei-kango, wasei-eigo), not borrowed whole.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.