Word.ws English Dictionary

bishonen

bishonen noun: an Asian aesthetic of young men whose beauty (and sex appeal) transcends the boundary of gender or sexual orientation, found in manga, etc.

Noun

bishonen (uncountable)

  1. An Asian aesthetic of young men whose beauty (and sex appeal) transcends the boundary of gender or sexual orientation, found in manga, etc.
    • Incidentally, I'm not sure you're bucking the trend so much as going along with it; FTM crossplay is getting pretty popular, although you see more women going for bishounen and visual-kei genderfucky stars than anything else.2001 May 22, Wednesday, “Re: 'There are only 500 REAL anime fans in the UK'”, in uk.media.animation.anime (Usenet), message-ID <-6y*A5OWo@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk>

Forms of bishonen

alternative formbishounen

Origin of bishonen

Borrowed from Japanese 美少年 (bishōnen びしょうねん), from Middle Chinese 美 (mij^X, “beautiful”) + 少年 (syewᴴ nen, “teenaged boy”) (compare Mandarin 少年 (shàonián)).

Words formed from bishonen

Questions about bishonen

What does bishonen mean?
Bishonen means an Asian aesthetic of young men whose beauty (and sex appeal) transcends the boundary of gender or sexual orientation, found in manga, etc.
What part of speech is bishonen?
Bishonen is a noun.

Words near bishonen in the dictionary

  1. Bishnupriya Manipuri
  2. Bishnupur
  3. Bisho
  4. Bishoff
  5. Bishoffs
  6. bishonen
  7. bishop
  8. Bishop Auckland
  9. Bishop Barker
  10. Bishop Barkers
  11. bishop bird

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bishonen (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “bishonen.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bishonen. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.