Japan Signs: Waiting Room
Monday, December 14th, 2009
This kanji sign caught my eye at Shinjuku station in Tokyo as it was quite a cool November morning and the glass waiting room (待合室) attached to the sign turned out to be a whole lot warmer than standing on the platform waiting for my train up to Nikko.
So as we can see in the photo there are just three kanji featured:
| Kanji | Hiragana | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 待 | まち | Wait |
| 合 | あい | Fit, suit, join, merge |
| 室 | しつ | Room, apartment |
| 待合 | まちあい | Meeting place |
To get to our final meaning, the first two kanji need to be concatenated in to what is known as a kanji compound, where two kanji are joined together to form a new word.
Sometimes the word resulting from the two kanji joined together has very little or nothing to do with the two kanji within it and other times it all makes perfect sense like this example.
待合 as a compound gives us the first part of the phrase “meeting place” plus the third kanji means “room”.
