First opened Friday, January 29, 2010
ズボン
ズボン
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
- 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).
trousers
Trousers are an “underskirt”: ズボン comes from French jupon.
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.
In a sentence
私はズボンをはいた。
I put on my trousers.
それは僕のズボンです。
Those are my trousers.
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.
- “Borrowed from French jupon (“petticoat, underskirt”), from French jupe (“skirt”), from old Italian jupa, from Arabic جُبَّة (jubba, “long garment”). Doublet of 襦袢.”
- Hedged“Note that the meaning has changed from “underskirt” to “trousers/pants”, and the second consonant has changed from /p/ to /b/, possibly influenced by native Japanese onomatopoeia ずぼん (zubon), describing the action of something sliding into place, as when one puts on or takes off trousers.”
Source: Wiktionary: ズボン (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
- 外来語 Loanword
- Words taken from a language other than Chinese, mostly European ones, usually written in katakana.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Meaning shift
- The word's meaning moved away from where it started.