First opened Sunday, June 6, 2010
食堂
しょくどう
- 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).
cafeteria, dining hall
Shokudō was jikidō, a refectory in a Buddhist temple, before the Meiji period's kan'on reading of 食.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Wiktionary's text doesn't split this word, so each part is one of its kanji (with the okurigana written after it), with the reading and the dictionary meaning KANJIDIC2 gives that character — a word doesn't always use every sense of its kanji.
In a sentence
食堂はどこですか。
Where is the cafeteria?
食堂は何時にあきますか。
What time does the dining room open?
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.
- “/d͡ʑikidoː/ → /ɕokudoː/”
- “Shift from older reading jikidō (“refectory in a Buddhist temple”). In the Meiji period, the pronunciation shifted to using the kan'on reading of shoku for 食 as the sense expanded to indicate dining facilities in a dormitory, and from there, to any larger room for serving or selling food to multiple people.”
- “First attested in 1903.”
Source: Wiktionary: 食堂 (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 食堂 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not しょくどう. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
じきどう
- “/d͡ʑikidau/ → /d͡ʑikidɔː/ → /d͡ʑikidoː/”
- “From Middle Chinese 食堂 (MC zyik dang). First attested in 747.”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.