First opened Thursday, July 5, 2012
雌
めす
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 2
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).
female (animal)
Mesu is first cited to 1867, and its final -su is of uncertain derivation.
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 雌
In a sentence
あの犬はオスかメスか。
Is that dog male or female?
カンガルーの雌は子供を腹の袋に入れて動く。
A female kangaroo carries its young in the pouch.
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.
- “First cited to 1867.”
- Hedged“The initial me- is the same me component seen in many terms referring to senses of "female". The final -su portion is of uncertain derivation.”
- Hedged“The kanji as used originally in Chinese and in older Japanese with the on'yomi of shi referred more specifically to female birds. If the term mesu is much older than the 1800s, the final -su portion may be the ancient morpheme that appears in various names for types of bird, such as 烏 (karasu, “crow”) or 鶯 (uguisu, “bush warbler”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 雌 (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 雌 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not めす. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
め
- “Appears in the Kojiki of 712 CE.”
- “From Old Japanese 女 (me, “woman”). This spelling is used exclusively for non-human contexts.”
めん
- “First cited to 1839.”
- “/me no/ → /men/”
- “From fusion of 雌 (me, “female plant or animal”) + の (no, “possessive particle”).”
し
- “From Middle Chinese 雌 (MC tshje).”
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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.