First opened Wednesday, October 21, 2009
お休み
おやすみ
Pitch accent: We don't have the data for this section. No accent list gives this spelling and reading, or the two we check against disagree.
holiday, absence; (exp.) Good night
Good night is a polite “rest” — and the verb for rest began as an adjective meaning “easy”.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Written with 休
In a sentence
おやすみ、よく眠れ。
Good night, sleep tight.
私は彼女におやすみといった。
I bade good night to her.
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.
- “Compound of 御(お) (o-, honorific prefix) + 休(やす)み (yasumi, “rest, a break, a holiday”), the 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 休(やす)む (yasumu), itself from adjective 安(やす)い (yasui, “easygoing; easy”) + verbalizing suffix む (-mu).”
- “Ultimately derived the same as above, but generally regarded as a shortening of the longer phrase お休みなさい (oyasumi nasai, “good night”).”
Source: Wiktionary: お休み (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
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Clipping
- A longer word or phrase shortened in everyday use.