Meaning of Onii-chan, Onee-chan, Onii-san and Onee-san

Have you ever wondered what onii-chan, onee-chan, onii-san, onee-san and other variations in Japanese mean? These words are used to refer to brothers in the Japanese language and are quite heard in the anime. In this post we will do a deep search to understand the meaning and difference of these words.

Previously we wrote an article talking about family members in Japanese, to remember we will also leave a video that our Sensei did about family members below (Sorry, this video is only available in Portuguese).

Article Summary
- The meaning of onii-chan, onee-chan, onii-san and onee-san 
- The different ways to say older brother in Japanese 
- Kyoudai, shimai - other ways to speak about brothers in Japanese

The meaning of onii-chan, onee-chan, onii-san and onee-san

Onii-chan and Onee-chan is nothing more than an informal way of talking older brother and older sister. Onii [お兄] literally means older brother and Onee [お姉] means older sister. Chan is an children’s honorific of treatment, informal and intimate, as if it were a diminutive (little sister).

The most formal and common is to use the suffix san, so we hear a lot also the words onii-san for older brother and onee-san for older sister. Both these oniichan, oneechan, oniisan and oneesan expressions can be used as an honorific suffix after the name such as: Kevin-oniichan.

This treatment is used for any older sibling you have, sometimes it is even used with people you consider a sibling, even without any kinship. The younger brothers have treatments similar to the words otouto [弟] meaning younger brother and imouto [妹] which means younger sister.

Oniichan or Onii-chan, what’s right? There is no right way, this stroke is just a romanization option that we use to separate the brother words from the suffix chan or another suffix like san. Be careful not to just write onichan because there you will be referring to the demon, ogre or monster Oni [鬼].

The different ways to say older brother in Japanese

In Japanese there is a hierarchy of treatment, a formal, informal and informal language. This is one of the main reasons there are so many variations and ways of saying older brother in Japanese. To facilitate we will put a list of words below exemplifying a little the idea:

Remembering that all the words in the list below refer to sisters or older brother:

Aniki is often used by the yakuza, it is as if it were a brother comrade, where the ideogram [貴] refers to something precious, esteemed and valuable.

Kyoudai, shimai – other ways to speak about brothers in Japanese

The relationship between younger and older siblings is highly valued in Japan, not to mention that the Japanese are slow to put younger sisters who call their brother onii-chan in the anime.

We have already mentioned that brother and younger sister are imouto [妹] and otouto [弟], but it is not so common to use suffixes as san [さん] and chan [ちゃん] for younger siblings, but neither is wrong nor so unusual. If you search for younger sister in jisho you will see that there are endless ways to pass on the idea of younger but unusual sister.

If we want to speak in the plural brothers and sisters we can use the junction of the ideograms of older brother and younger brother. Brothers in Japanese is written kyoudai [兄弟] and sisters in Japanese is written shimai [姉妹].

Kyoudai can encompass all siblings up to the female, although rare you can find Kyoudai written in other ways using 2 of the 4 ideograms that is used for siblings [兄 – 弟 – 姉 – 妹].

I hope this article has clarified all doubts about the words onii-chan, onee-chan, onii-san and onee-san, others related to siblings in Japanese like imouto, otouto, kyoudai and shimai! Thanks for the comments and shares!