First opened Sunday, December 23, 2012
雄
おす
- 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).
male (animal)
Osu is 雄 (o, “male”) plus す (su), though the su is of unknown derivation.
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.
Written with 雄
In a sentence
あの犬はオスかメスか。
Is that dog male or female?
雄のくじゃくは尾の羽毛が色彩豊かである。
The male peacock has colorful tail feathers.
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.
- “/wosu/ → /osu/”
- Hedged“Compound of 雄 (o, “male”) + す (su), but the derivation of the su element is unknown.”
- “See also the etymology of 雌 (mesu).”
Source: Wiktionary: 雄 (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 雄 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not おす. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ゆう
- “From Middle Chinese 雄 (hjuwng, “male”).”
お
- “/wo/ → /o/”
- “From Old Japanese. Persists in compounds, such as the first element o- in the modern Japanese term 夫(おっと) (wohito > otto, “husband”).”
おん
- “/won/ → /on/”
- “Compound of 雄 (o, “male”) + ん (n). The latter -n element might be a contraction of the possessive particle の (no).”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.