First opened Tuesday, October 6, 2009
伯母
おば
- 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).
(humble) aunt (older than one's parent)
The word for an aunt is a “little mother” — and the kanji don't spell it that way.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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.
- “From 小 (o, “little”) + 母 (ha, “mother”). The kanji is jukujikun (熟(じゅく)字(じ)訓(くん)). Compare 小母 (oba).”
Source: Wiktionary: 伯母 (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 伯母 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not おば. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
はくぼ
- “From Chinese 伯母 (bómǔ, “paternal aunt”).”
What the labels mean
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.