First opened Tuesday, September 29, 2009
少年
しょうねん
- flat (heiban)
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).
boys, juveniles
A “boy” once meant a young person of either gender, “young years” in Chinese.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
私は少年です。
I am a boy.
私は少年を見た。
I caught sight of the boy.
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.
- “/seunen/ → /ɕeunen/ → /ɕoːnen/”
- “Borrowing from Middle Chinese 少年 (syewᴴ nen, literally “young + years”). Compare modern Cantonese 少年 (siu³ nin⁴), Mandarin 少年 (shàonián), Korean 소년 (sonyeon), Vietnamese thiếu niên.”
- “Originally referred to young people of either gender. The meaning has narrowed in modern usage to more commonly refer to boys of elementary school or middle school age.”
Source: Wiktionary: 少年 (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.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.