First opened Wednesday, May 18, 2011
侍
さむらい
- 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).
samurai
Samurai is a sound shift from saburai, itself the stem of classical 侍ふ (saburafu, “to serve”).
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 侍
In a sentence
太郎には侍の血が流れている。
A samurai's blood runs in Taro's veins.
『うぐいす侍』人間愛とユーモア溢れる侍物語。
"The Nightingale Samurai" is a samurai tale full of humanity and humour.
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.
- “⟨sa morapi₁⟩ → /saburapi/ → /saburafi/ → /samurawi/ → /samurai/”
- “Sound shift from saburai (see below), itself the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, stem or continuative form) of classical verb 侍ふ (saburafu, “to serve”, modern saburau).”
- “The shift from saburaf- → samuraf- is due to the development of the 女性語 (josei-go, “women's language”) in Middle Japanese. A different development of this b is seen in 候 (sōrō, “service”, classical saurafu).”
Source: Wiktionary: 侍 (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 侍 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not さむらい. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
さぶらい
- “⟨sa morapi₁⟩ → /saburapi/ → /saburafi/ → /saburawi/ → /saburai/”
- “The 連用形 (ren'yōkei, stem or continuative form) of classical verb 侍ふ (saburafu, “to serve”).”
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.