First opened Monday, June 28, 2010
僕
ぼく
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
I (used by men towards those of equal or lower status)
Boku shifted from the kun'yomi of shimobe or yatsugare to the on'yomi, and became prevalent around the Meiji period.
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 僕
In a sentence
僕は忙しい。
I'm busy.
僕は猫背だ。
I am round shouldered.
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.
- “Shift in reading from the kun'yomi of shimobe or yatsugare to use the on'yomi of boku instead, first attested in kundoku contexts from the mid-to-late 1700s and becoming prevalent from around the Meiji period.”
Source: Wiktionary: 僕 (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 僕 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ぼく. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
しもべ
- “Compound of 下(しも) (shimo, “lower”) + 部(べ) (be, “servant to the imperial court”). First attested in the Nihon Shoki of 720, with the spelling 下客.”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.