First opened Monday, December 14, 2009
お腹
おなか
- 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).
stomach
The “stomach” was a deliberately indirect word for “belly”, spelled with a character that means something else.
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.
Written with 腹
In a sentence
お腹が痛いの。
I have a stomachache.
お腹がぺこぺこです。
I'm starved.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “Compound of 御 (o-, honorific prefix) + 中 (naka, “insides; innards, stomach”). Originally coined as a deliberately indirect 女房詞 (nyōbō kotoba, “woman's word”) for 腹 (hara, “belly, gut”).”
- Hedged“The use of the 腹 character to spell 中 (naka) appears to be a relatively recent shift; many dictionaries still list 御中 or お中 as the standard spelling for this term, but usage trends clearly show that this お腹 spelling is now more common for the belly senses.”
Source: Wiktionary: お腹 (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 お腹 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not おなか. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
おはら
- “Compound of 御 (o-, honorific prefix) + 腹 (hara, “stomach, belly”).”
What the labels mean
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.