First opened Thursday, January 7, 2010
お母さん
おかあさん
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.
mother (formal)
“Mother” in two layers: a surface of “honorific, mother, honorific”, and under it the older o-kaka-sama.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Written with 母
In a sentence
坊や、おかあさんは何処だい？
Where is your mother, boy?
メアリーはおかあさんの手伝いをしています。
Mary is helping her mother.
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.
- “As a surface analysis, this is a compound of 御 (o-, honorific prefix) + 母 (kā, “mother”) + さん (-san, honorific suffix).”
- “Historically, this represents a sound shift from older term o-kaka-sama, itself a compound of 御 (o-, honorific prefix) + 母 (kaka, “mother”) + 様 (-sama, honorific suffix).”
- “/okakasama/ → /okkasama/ → /okaːsama/”
- “/okakasama/ → /okkasama/ → /okaːsan/”
- “Attested in Osaka and Kyoto, with rare use in Edo (Tokyo), from the late Edo period, especially among upper-middle class households in Osaka.”
- “Usage became widespread in the 20th century after the Ministry of Education adopted お父(とう)さん (otōsan, “father”) and お母(かあ)さん for use in 尋常小学読本 (Jinjō shōgaku dokuhon “Standard elementary school reader”, 1903).”
Source: Wiktionary: お母さん (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
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.