First opened Monday, January 3, 2011
お手洗い
おてあらい
Pitch accent: We don't have the data for this section. No accent list gives this spelling and reading, or the two we check against disagree.
toilet, restroom, bathroom (lit., a place to wash one's hands)
Otearai is 御 (o-) plus 手洗い (tearai, “hand washing”): literally the hand-washing place.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
お手洗いはどこですか。
Where's the restroom?
お手洗いを拝借できますか。
May I use the bathroom?
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.
- “御(お) (o-, honorific prefix) + 手(て)洗(あら)い (tearai, “hand washing”)”
Source: Wiktionary: お手洗い (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
- 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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.