First opened Saturday, May 8, 2010
妹
いもうと
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 4
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).
younger sister (humble)
Imōto was imo + hito: a u-sound shift glued “sister” and “person” together.
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.
Written with 妹
In a sentence
私の妹は有名だ。
My sister is famous.
彼は妹がいません。
He doesn't have a sister.
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.
- “⟨imo₁⟩ → */imʷo/ → /imo/”
- “From Old Japanese 妹 (imo₁). First cited in the Kojiki of 712.”
- Hedged“Speculatively, may be related to terms such as 女 (me₁, womi₁na, “woman”), 嫗 (omi₁na, “elderly woman”), and 母 (omo, “mother”), wherein the medial /-m-/ appears to signify woman, female. However, the difference in vowel values presents a difficulty.”
- “/imo ɸito/ → /imowito/ → */imowuto/ → /imoːto/”
- “Originally a compound of 妹 (imo, “sister, close female companion”) + 人 (hito, “person”). First cited in The Tales of Ise of the early 900s.”
- Hedged“This is an instance of ウ音便 (u onbin, “u sound shift”), found in terms with bilabial consonants (/m/, /b/, /w/) followed by i; commonly seen in terms such as 玄人 (kurōto, “professional”), 素人 (shirōto, “amateur”), or possibly, 相撲 (sumō, “sumo”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 妹 (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 妹 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not いもうと. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
いもと
- “Analyzed as a shortening of imōto, itself a compound 妹 (imo, “sister, close female companion”) + 人 (hito, “person”).”
- “Appears in The Tale of Heiji, written around the mid-12th century. May be much older, as this reading is also included in kun'yomi glosses for the Nihon Shoki of 720 (although the manuscripts with the glosses themselves are not as old).”
まい
- “From Middle Chinese 妹 (MC mwojH).”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.