First opened Tuesday, October 20, 2009
御中
おんちゅう
- 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).
Messrs.
The “Messrs.” you write on a company envelope is an honorific stuck on the word for “inside”.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
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.
- “Compound of 御 (on-, honorific prefix) + 中 (chū, “inside; middle”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 御中 (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 御中 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not おんちゅう. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
おなか
- “Compound of 御 (o-, honorific prefix) + 中 (naka, “inside; middle”). Originally coined as a 女房詞 (nyōbō kotoba, “woman's word”).”
おちゅう
- “Compound of 御 (o-, honorific prefix) + 中 (chū, “inside; middle”).”
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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.