First opened Wednesday, October 28, 2009
女房
にょうぼう
- 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).
wife
“Wife” began, in Chinese, as a woman of the “room, chamber”.
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
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- Hedged“Probably ultimately from Middle Chinese 女房 (MC nrjoX bjang), with an initial meaning in line with the spelling: 女 (woman) + 房 (“room, chamber”). First cited to 985.”
- “* /njoːboː/ → /njoːbo/”
- “Shortening of the final vowel in 女房 (nyōbō).”
- “First cited to 1752.”
Source: Wiktionary: 女房 (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 女房 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not にょうぼう. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
にゅうぼう
- “Shift from 女房 (nyōbō).”
- “First cited to a text from the late 1100s.”
- “This form of the word gained greater currency during the Muromachi period (1336–1573), then fell out of use in the early Edo period (1603–1868). It is possible that this form of the word is simply an orthographical variant; various Japanese references indicate that it might have still been pronounced as something like nyōbō.”
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.
- Clipping
- A longer word or phrase shortened in everyday use.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.