First opened Tuesday, December 8, 2009
背負う
せおう
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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).
to be burdened with; to carry on (one's) back or shoulder(s)
To shoulder a burden is, literally, to “carry on the back”.
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 背 (se, “back”) + 負う (ou, “to carry or bear something”).”
- “First cited in the early 1200s.”
Source: Wiktionary: 背負う (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 背負う on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not せおう. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
しょう
- “Phonological shift from 背負う (seou) above, as the /se/ sound was formerly pronounced more like /ɕe/, as recorded in the Nippo Jisho of 1603. This Japanese-Portuguese dictionary transcribes all instances of せ (se) using the then-current Portuguese orthography of ⟨xe⟩, where the ⟨x⟩ spelling indicated [ʃ], similar to the initial consonant sound in English shed.”
- “* /ɕeou/ → /ɕjou/ → /ɕʲou/”
- “This reading is first attested in a text from 1278.”
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.