First opened Monday, February 1, 2010
サラリーマン
サラリーマン
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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).
salaryman; company employee
Often called “fake English”, サラリーマン may be real English with a letter dropped.
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
彼は普通のサラリーマンだ。
He's just an ordinary office worker.
なあに、しがないサラリーマンですよ。
Me? I'm a plain old salaryman.
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.
- “First cited to 1924 in the novel Chijin no Ai (published in English as Naomi) by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki.”
- Hedged“Although often described as wasei eigo (和製英語), this appears to derive from the English phrase salaried man, which appears in print at least as early as 1828. Additionally, the English noun phrase “salary man” also predates the Japanese term. The resulting Japanese term was reimported into English as a compound in the late 20th century.”
- “The form is a regular phonological clipping of the borrowed phrase, dropping the English past‐participle suffix to fit Japanese phonotactics, analyzable as サラリー (sararī) + マン (-man).”
- “The term began to be used in the Taishō period and became firmly established by the early Shōwa period. Prior to its popularization, terms such as 月給取り, 俸給生活者, and 勤め人 were used for similar workers, alongside more derogatory terms like 腰弁当 and 洋服細民. Around 1960, the term ビジネスマン (bijinesuman) also started being used to avoid the mediocre image associated with this word.”
Source: Wiktionary: サラリーマン (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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Made in Japan
- Coined in Japan from foreign material (wasei-kango, wasei-eigo), not borrowed whole.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Clipping
- A longer word or phrase shortened in everyday use.