椅子
Meaning in Englishchair
Animated kanji stroke order
Related sentences
Word context
What it means
椅子 (isu) means a single-person piece of furniture raised off the floor, typically with a backrest, designed to provide a supported place to sit; it refers to standalone seating commonly found in homes, offices, classrooms, restaurants and public spaces.
Main meanings
- Physical elevated seat distinguished from floor seating or cushions, often movable and used for individual sitting.
- Metonymic use referring to someone's place or allotted spot within a group or event (a figurative 'seat' or position).
- Product-category sense in commerce and reviews, used to group types (e.g., dining chairs, office chairs) rather than a single unit.
How to use it
Used in everyday and formal contexts to refer to seating in homes, offices, classrooms, restaurants and public facilities; appears in product descriptions, furniture catalogs, signage and service instructions, and is used with counters or qualifiers when specifying quantity, style, or placement within a room or venue.
Variants and close terms
- 座席 (zaseki) — seat (allocated seat in transport or venues)
- イス (isu) — katakana form often used in advertising or catalogues
- ベンチ (benchi) — bench (long seat for multiple people)
- 座布団 (zabuton) — floor cushion (contrasts with raised seating)
Composition
- 椅子 (isu): 椅 contains the 木 (wood/tree) radical suggesting a wooden object and a phonetic/semantic element tied to support or leaning; 子 is a common suffix that forms concrete nouns. Together the characters convey the idea of a supported object for sitting.
Etymology
椅子 (isu) is a Sino-Japanese compound whose characters and basic sense were adopted from Classical Chinese compounds for seating; the form and pronunciation were integrated into Japanese through historical borrowing and phonological adaptation, producing the modern spoken form isu.
Origin
Traditional Japanese living centered on tatami and low-floor seating, so elevated chairs were uncommon historically; raised chairs became widely adopted in Japan during the late 19th-century Meiji modernization and subsequent industrialization as Western furniture styles and mass-produced seating entered homes, schools, offices and public buildings.
Word class
noun (名詞)