The Double Wasei-Eigo

ノートパソコン (nōto pasokon) is a fascinating example of a double wasei-eigo — a Japanese-coined English word built from two pieces of borrowed English, both of which have been transformed.

Let’s break it down:

• ノート (nōto) comes from “notebook” — but shortened to just “note”
• パソコン (pasokon) comes from “personal computer” — abbreviated from the full パーソナルコンピューター (pāsonaru konpyūtā)

Put them together and you get “note pasokon” — a word no English speaker would ever say. In English, we just call it a laptop.

Why Japanese Loves Abbreviating Loanwords

Japanese has a strong tendency to shorten long loanwords, especially compound words. The language favors taking the first two syllables of each word and combining them. This pattern is everywhere in tech vocabulary:

• スマホ (sumaho) = smart phone → smartphone
• リモコン (rimokon) = remote control → remote control
• エアコン (eakon) = air conditioner → air conditioner / AC
• パソコン (pasokon) = personal computer → PC

The pattern is consistent: take the first part of each English word, smash them together, and you have a new Japanese word that sounds nothing like the original English.

パソコン: A Wasei-Eigo Inside a Wasei-Eigo

What makes ノートパソコン especially interesting is that パソコン is itself already a wasei-eigo abbreviation. So when Japanese added ノート in front, they created a wasei-eigo built on top of another wasei-eigo — like linguistic nesting dolls.

The full unabbreviated version would be ノートブック・パーソナル・コンピューター (nōtobukku pāsonaru konpyūtā) — a mouthful that nobody actually says.

Fun Fact

If you walk into a Japanese electronics store and ask for a “laptop,” the staff might not immediately understand. Ask for a ノートパソコン (or just ノーパソ/nōpaso in casual speech), and they’ll point you right to the laptop section. Meanwhile, スマホ (sumaho) for smartphone follows the exact same abbreviation pattern — proof that this word-shortening habit is alive and well in modern Japanese.