Word.ws English Dictionary

shoujo ai

shoujo ai noun: anime and manga that explore emotional, but largely platonic, homoerotic relationships between women.

Noun

shoujo ai (uncountable)

  1. (Japanese) Anime and manga that explore emotional, but largely platonic, homoerotic relationships between women.
  2. (Japanese, slang) A genre of manga, anime, or hentai featuring lesbian sex and romance; yuri.
  3. (slang) Lolicon.

Origin of shoujo ai

Two connected etymologies. Either interpreted as a calque of Japanese 少女愛 (shōjo ai), or a specialized neologism created in analogy to shounen ai (Japanese 少年愛(しょうねんあい) (shōnen'ai)) using Japanese vocabulary.

Questions about shoujo ai

What does shoujo ai mean?
Shoujo ai means anime and manga that explore emotional, but largely platonic, homoerotic relationships between women.
What part of speech is shoujo ai?
Shoujo ai is a noun.

Words near shoujo ai in the dictionary

  1. shou'dst
  2. Shoufeng
  3. shough
  4. shoughs
  5. shoujo
  6. shoujo ai
  7. should
  8. should hope
  9. should of
  10. should on
  11. should see the other guy

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shoujo ai (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: “shoujo ai.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/shoujo_ai. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.