First opened Saturday, March 10, 2012
親父
おやじ
- flat (heiban)
- 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).
one's father, old man, one's boss
Oyaji is perhaps 親 (oya, “parent”) plus 父 (chichi, “father”), altered from an earlier form, oyachichi.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
In a sentence
彼はおやじにそっくりだ。
He's a carbon copy of his father.
親父はじっと私の顔を見た。
Father looked me full in the face.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- Hedged“Perhaps from 親 (oya, “parent”) + 父 (chichi, “father”). The reading appears to be an alteration of an earlier form, oyachichi, perhaps under the influence of 爺 (chichi, jiji, jī, “old man”). The kanji are jukujikun (熟(じゅく)字(じ)訓(くん)).”
Source: Wiktionary: 親父 (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 親父 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not おやじ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
しんぷ
- “From Chinese 親父 /亲父 (qīnfù).”
What the labels mean
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.