Word.ws English Dictionary

yobai

yobai noun: an ancient Japanese custom in which a young unmarried man would go out at night and silently enter the house of a young unmarried woman for sexual intercourse, sometimes as a prelude to marriage.

Noun

yobai (uncountable)

  1. (historical) An ancient Japanese custom in which a young unmarried man would go out at night and silently enter the house of a young unmarried woman for sexual intercourse, sometimes as a prelude to marriage.
    Synonyms:
    night crawling

Synonyms of yobai

Origin of yobai

From Japanese 夜這い (literally “night crawling”).

Questions about yobai

What does yobai mean?
Yobai means an ancient Japanese custom in which a young unmarried man would go out at night and silently enter the house of a young unmarried woman for sexual intercourse, sometimes as a prelude to marriage.
What part of speech is yobai?
Yobai is a noun.

Words near yobai in the dictionary

  1. Yoakums
  2. yoal
  3. yoals
  4. Yoav
  5. yob
  6. yobai
  7. yobberies
  8. yobbery
  9. yobbish
  10. yobbishly
  11. yobbishness

Source and license

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