First opened Thursday, May 27, 2010
女
おんな
- tail-high (odaka): 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).
woman, female
Onna was womina in Old Japanese, then omina, and the source traces womi1na → womʉna → wonːa → onːa.
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 女
In a sentence
女の心は猫の目。
A woman's mind and winter wind change often.
彼女は意地悪女だ。
She's a big teaser.
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.
- “⟨womi₁na⟩ → */womʲina/ → /womʉna/ → /wonːa/ → /onːa/”
- “Shift from Old Japanese womina → omina. See the 女 (omina) entry for further details.”
- “Now one of the standard Japanese words for "a woman".”
Source: Wiktionary: 女 (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 女 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not おんな. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
おみな
- “⟨womi₁na⟩ → */womʲina/ → /omina/”
- “From Old Japanese.”
- “The initial /wo/ expressed "small, youth" and contrasted with /o/ "grown, old" (as in 嫗 (omina, “old woman”)), while the medial /mi/ is cognate with 女 (me, “female, woman”, see below). According to Frellesvig (2010), proto-Japonic /e/ became Old Japanese [je] in final position and [i] elsewhere; analogous with PJ /o/, which became OJ [wo] in final position and [u] elsewhere (though PJ /i/ and /u/ also existed, compare Old Japanese 火's two readings /po/ & /pu/ in Western & Eastern Old Japanese, respectively (Vovin, 2017)).”
め
- “⟨me₁⟩ → */mʲe/ → /me/”
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *mia.”
- “Appears to be distinct from 目 (⟨me₂⟩ → me, “eye”).”
おうな
- “⟨womi₁na⟩ → */womʲina/ → /womʉna/ → /woũna/ → /woːna/ → /oːna/”
- “Variant shift from Old Japanese womina → omina (see above).”
おな
- “/wonːa/ → /wona/ → /ona/”
- “Shift from onna (see above).”
おなあ
- “/wona/ → /wonaː/ → /onaː/”
- “Long-pronounced form of ona (see above).”
じょ
- “/dɨo/ → /d͡ʑo/”
- “From Middle Chinese 女 (MC nrjoX|nrjoH).”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.