English 'futon' from Japanese '布団' (cloth + round pad) — a thin floor mattress in Japan, reinvented in the West as a sofa bed.
A Japanese-style mattress that can be rolled up for storage; in Western usage, a sofa bed with a foldable frame and a mattress.
From Japanese '布団' (futon, a padded mattress or quilt), composed of two Sino-Japanese morphemes: '布' (fu, cloth, fabric, spread out) + '団' (ton, a round thing, a lump, a padded roll; from Chinese 'tuán,' a ball, a lump). The Japanese futon originally referred to a thin quilted mattress spread directly on tatami matting for sleeping, and folded away and stored during the day — an essential element of traditional Japanese interior design, which treats sleeping space and living space as identical. The Chinese morpheme 'tuán' (団) carries the sense of something rounded
The Western 'futon' — a thick mattress on a hinged wooden frame — would be nearly unrecognizable to a Japanese person. A traditional Japanese futon is a thin, foldable mattress (shikibuton) paired with a quilt-like comforter (kakebuton), laid directly on tatami flooring and stored in a closet during the day. The frame-based design was an American invention of the 1970s, created to appeal to Western tastes while borrowing