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### Question

少女 means `little girl` because 少 means `little/small` and 女 means
`lady/female`. It makes sense here. However it does not make sense when I read
少年 because 年 means `year`. **Is there any reason why 年 was used instead of 男
which means`men/male`?**

### Research

My stackexchange search skills are poor, and my
[search](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/search?q=%E5%B0%91%E5%B9%B4)
[attempts](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/search?q=%E5%B0%91%E5%A5%B3) did
not yield anything relevant to my question. Googling something however gave me
[this Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sh%C5%8Dnen).

It said:

> Shōnen (少年?), shonen, or shounen, is a kango word that literally means few
> years and generally refers to a typical boy from elementary school through
> high school age. It is used in everyday conversation when referring to the
> period of youth, including in legal wording referencing youth, without
> regard to gender.

So if my understanding is correct 少年 means young person regardless of gender
(because `small years` or `few years` [of living] means the person is still
young).

However, this does not answer my question as to why the counterpart of 少女 is
少年 and not 少男.

Some expert opinion on this would be appreciated because the Wikipedia article
I quoted has the superscript `clarification needed`.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-09-16T04:10:24.690
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2015-09-18T04:40:12.980
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question
words kanji
If 'little girl' is 「少女」, then why is 'little boy' 「少年」?
Im no expert in Japanese but
[macraf](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/users/11104/macraf)'s comment
somehow enlightened me to an answer.

In English, we have nouns like god, actor, waiter etc. These nouns do not
necessarily denote a gender because they are **supersets**. Their subsets are:
god & goddess for god, actor & actress for actor and waiter and waitress for
waiter.

Visually it's like:

```

      god            actor            waiter
      / \             / \              / \
    god goddess   actor actress   waiter waitress
    
```

As you can see, the superset is also the word for the male, and the one for
the female is another word.

So in the case of the question, 少年 is the superset for young people. Following
the above example, it will also be the word for the male, and the word for the
female is another word, 少女.

```

      少年
      /  |
    少年 少女
    
```
CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-09-16T08:54:56.973
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2015-09-17T00:13:51.247
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answer