salaryman means an employee, a worker; now especially a Japanese white-collar worker who works long hours yet has an insignificant position within the corporate hierarchy. Lexicurio rates it Sui generis — a strength score of 88 out of 100.
salaryman is pronounced /ˈsæl.əɹ.i.mæn/.
Why “salaryman” is a great word
SALARYMAN — [Noun] A Japanese white-collar worker, typically male, employed in a corporate environment and characterized by long hours, salaried status, and limited authority within a hierarchical structure. A phono-semantic matching and pseudo-anglicism from Japanese サラリーマン (sararīman), itself derived from English 'salary' + 'man'. First attested in English in the 1960s. Unlike “businessman,” which implies entrepreneurial agency, or “office worker,” a neutral generic, “salaryman” denotes a specific archetype of institutional life. He is the last man on the darkened train, the bowed head in the fluorescent-lit meeting, the uniformed silhouette in the elevator bank—a life measured not in ambition, but in the quiet erosion of the individual into a perfectly interchangeable component.
Etymology
Phono-semantic matching of Japanese サラリーマン (sararīman), itself a wasei eigo (和製英語; pseudo-anglicism) derived from salary + man.
noun
- An employee, a worker; now especially a Japanese white-collar worker who works long hours yet has an insignificant position within the corporate hierarchy.“In this way, the salaryman was both a progressive social stratum and an intellectual class.”