First opened Tuesday, September 15, 2009
彼女
かのじょ
- 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).
girlfriend; she
“She” began as “that woman” — and only became a pronoun around 1888, under Western influence.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Wiktionary's text doesn't split this word, so each part is one of its kanji (with the okurigana written after it), with the reading and the dictionary meaning KANJIDIC2 gives that character — a word doesn't always use every sense of its kanji.
In a sentence
彼女は歩く。
She walks.
彼女新顔だよ。
She's new fish in the pond.
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.
- “First appears in writing in the late Edo period as a compound of 彼の (kano, ano, “that”) + 女 (onna, “woman”) with the reading kano onna or ano onna, simply meaning “that woman”. The kanojo reading arose by replacing the kun'yomi reading of onna for the second character with its on'yomi of jo. The first written appearance of the kanojo reading is in 1876, in the 改正画引小学読本 (Kaisei Gakubiki Shōgaku Dokuhon, “Revised Stroke-ordered Elementary-school Reader”). The first clear use of this term as a pronoun is around 1888, arising out of influence from Western works. The kanojo reading became more common and replaced kano onna and ano onna during the Taishō period (1912-1926).”
Source: Wiktionary: 彼女 (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.