First opened Sunday, October 31, 2010
赤ん坊
あかんぼう
- 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).
baby
Akanbō is attested from the 19th century, shifted from earlier 赤坊 (akabō): 赤 (aka, “red”) plus 坊 (-bō, “little”).
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.
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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.
- “Attested from the 19th century. Sound shift from slightly earlier 赤坊 (akabō), from 赤 (aka, “red”) + 坊 (-bō, “little”). Compare 赤ちゃん (aka-chan) and 赤子 (akago), both of which also allude to the reddish complexion of a newborn.”
Source: Wiktionary: 赤ん坊 (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
- 混種語 Hybrid
- Words that mix layers, e.g. a native part with a Chinese one.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.