kohai
kohai noun: a junior member of a group in Japanese arts; mentee.
Noun
kohai (plural kohais or kohai)
- A junior member of a group in Japanese arts; mentee.
- Juniors may forget their obligation to be in turn good seniors. Seniors may demand too much of their juniors. Some kohai are ungrateful. The system of interrelationship, however, continues to follow the form set by the ideal of unselfish sympathy and involvement.1974, Thomas P. Rohlen, For Harmony and Strength: Japanese White-Collar Organization in Anthropological Perspective, University of California Press, →ISBN, page 125
- The students always sit in order of seniority, both in and out of the training hall, and the kohai are always at the beck and call of the senpai.1989, Intersect, PHP Institute, →ISSN, page 7
- An underclassman or younger student.
Antonyms of kohai
Forms of kohai
| plural | kohais |
|---|---|
| plural | kohai |
| alternative form | kōhai |
| alternative form | kouhai |
Origin of kohai
Borrowed from Japanese 後(こう)輩(はい) (kōhai, literally “later cohort”). Doublet of hoobae.
Questions about kohai
- What does kohai mean?
- Kohai means a junior member of a group in Japanese arts; mentee.
- What part of speech is kohai?
- Kohai is a noun.
- What is the plural of kohai?
- The plural of kohai is kohais.
Words near kohai in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: kohai (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.
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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-kohai.wav.
Cite this entry: “kohai.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/kohai. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.