First opened Saturday, February 6, 2010
醤油
しょうゆ
- 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).
soy sauce
Soy sauce is “thick paste + oil”, and its sound has smoothed from /ɕauju/ to /ɕoːju/.
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.
- “/ɕauju/ → /ɕɔːju/ → /ɕoːju/”
- “First attested in the mid-Muromachi period.”
- “Orthographic borrowing from Chinese 醬油 /酱油 (literally “thick paste + oil”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 醤油 (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 醤油 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not しょうゆ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
しょうゆう
- “/ɕaujiu/ → /ɕɔːjuː/ → /ɕoːjuː/”
そい・しょい
- “Cognate with standard Japanese 醤(しょう)油(ゆ) (shōyu) and Okinawan 醤(そー)油(ゆー) (sōyū).”
What the labels mean
- 漢語 Sino-Japanese
- Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.