ベッド

Meaning in English

bed

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Word context

What it means

ベッド (beddo) means bed; it denotes a piece of furniture—typically a mattress on a frame or base—used primarily for sleeping or resting, found in homes, hotels, and medical settings and contrasted with traditional Japanese floor bedding in function and form.

Main meanings

1. Refers to specialized types of beds (for example hospital beds or bunk beds) where the context specifies function rather than a generic sleeping surface.
2. Colloquially can be used to mean just the mattress in contexts where the frame is irrelevant.
3. Appears in compound terms and set expressions related to bedrooms and sleep-related activities, extending its meaning into phrases about routines and furnishings.

How to use it

Used in everyday speech, retail, hospitality and medical contexts to indicate where someone sleeps or the type of sleeping furniture; the term is neutral in register, functions as a countable noun, commonly appears with quantifiers and particles when describing purchase, location, or number, and is frequently combined into compound nouns for specific bed types and bedroom concepts.

Variants and close terms

布団 (futon): traditional Japanese bedding, often placed directly on the floor;
マットレス (mattoresu): mattress, the sleeping surface often used on a bed frame;
寝具 (shingu): general term for bedding and sleep-related linens;
床 (yuka): floor, often contrasted with a bed as an alternative sleeping surface.

Etymology

ベッド (beddo) is a loanword adapted from English bed; Japanese phonology avoids consonant-final syllables, so the word was nativized by adding a vowel and representing the final consonant with a small ッ plus ド, producing the geminated consonant and vowel sequence heard in the pronunciation.

Origin

Western-style beds were introduced to Japan during the Meiji period as part of modernization, became more common with 20th-century furniture imports and manufacturing, and expanded rapidly after World War II alongside changes in housing; this shift led many households to move from traditional 布団 (futon) sleeping to beds over the course of the 20th century.

Word class

noun (名詞・外来語)