Word.ws English Dictionary

ryō

ryō noun: a gold currency unit in the shakkanhō system in pre-Meiji Japan.

ryō: a gold currency unit in the shakkanhō system in pre-Meiji Japan
Image: As6673, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

ryō (plural ryō)

  1. A gold currency unit in the shakkanhō system in pre-Meiji Japan.
    • He pulled three gold ryō out of his pocket, made a hole in one of them with a short sword, and gave it to the child to play with.2001, Monumenta Nipponica, volume 56, Sophia University, page 35
    • When he started off to go anywhere, which he frequently did quite casually, he always had two ryō in his pocket, which he explained, was for burial fee.2011 [1962], A[rthur] L[indsay] Sadler, The Japanese Tea Ceremony: Cha-No-Yu, Tuttle Publishing, →ISBN

Forms of ryō

pluralryō

Origin of ryō

From Japanese 両 (ryō).

Questions about ryō

What does ryō mean?
Ryō means a gold currency unit in the shakkanhō system in pre-Meiji Japan.
What part of speech is ryō?
Ryō is a noun.
What is the plural of ryō?
The plural of ryō is ryō.

Words near ryō in the dictionary

  1. ryvett
  2. ryvetts
  3. Ryvita
  4. Rywingate
  5. Ryzhivka
  6. ryō
  7. ryū
  8. ryūha
  9. Ryūjin
  10. Ryūkyū
  11. Ryūkyū Kingdom

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ryō (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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Cite this entry: “ryō.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ry%C5%8D. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.