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The Shinmeikai dictinary defines 椅子 as:

腰を掛け（てよりかか）るための家具

What does てよりかか mean there?

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    Inside the parentheses is not an independent chunk of words. It's meant to be parsed either including the parenthetical portion or not.
    – broccoli forest
    Jul 5, 2020 at 15:58
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    btw do you mean Shinmeikai? Because Shinnenkai means the new year's party.
    – broccoli forest
    Jul 5, 2020 at 16:07
  • Lol, yeah. I'll change it. Thanks
    – Thatguy
    Jul 5, 2020 at 19:36

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腰を掛ける (here in て-form) means to sit and 寄りかかる means to lean on.

A chair is a tool where you sit and rest your back against the back of the chair.

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  • I see. So, I was parsing the full てよりかか when the て was there just to complete 腰を掛け- and then add よりかか (寄りかかる) to the definition. Thanks
    – Thatguy
    Jul 5, 2020 at 19:36
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Nothing much to add to @永劫回帰's answer itself, just a follow-up about the format:

腰を掛け（てよりかか）るための家具

It's almost like writing in English:

a piece of furniture for sitt(ing and reclin)ing on

Of course you usually don't want to write such a Frankenstein sentence in English, but Japanese has no spaces between words and can be broken anywhere, so why not? As a result, we don't hesitate to insert fragments in parentheses wherever both ends meet around them.

小さ（くて見づら）い字
ブザーが聞こえ（なかっ）た時
無（理のない）課金

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  • Is this at all common, though? If a native encountered this, would they consider it intelligible but highly unusual?
    – jogloran
    Jul 6, 2020 at 5:01
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    @jogloran A dictionary proudly makes use of it, no? ;-) (Well, my last example is obviously a joke meme, though.)
    – broccoli forest
    Jul 6, 2020 at 5:24

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