First opened Monday, March 22, 2010
床屋
とこや
- 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).
barber's (shop)
A barber’s is a “raised-floor shop”: barbershops were historically often 床店, stalls on a raised floor.
Taken apart
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In a sentence
床屋に行きなさい。
Go to the barber.
床屋に行きなさいよ。
Why don't you get a haircut?
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.
- “From 床(とこ) (toko, “raised floor”) + 屋(や) (-ya, “shop”), due to how barbershops were historically often 床店(とこみせ) (tokomise, “stall with a raised floor used as a store”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 床屋 (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
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.