First opened Tuesday, September 13, 2005
いつ
いつ
Pitch accent: We don't have the data for this section. No accent list gives this spelling and reading, or the two we check against disagree.
when
Itsu is from Old Japanese, and its first syllable may be a root shared with 如何 (ikaga) and 何処 (izuko).
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
What Wiktionary says
Quoted line by line from Wiktionary's Etymology section for this reading, taken from one dated dump so it can't change underneath us. Nothing below is paraphrased.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *Etu. Appears in the Man'yōshū, completed some time after 759 CE.”
- Hedged“The presence of other Old Japanese indefinites beginning with い (i) suggests a possible shared root of い (i, possibly “what” or “which”), as in 如何 (ikaga, “how”), 何処 (izuko, “where”), 幾ら (ikura, “how many, how much”).”
- Hedged“Likely cognate with eastern Old Japanese word idu (modern idzu or izu, “where”), still used in modern Japanese as part of the word いずれ (izure, “which”).”
Source: Wiktionary: いつ (dump of 2026-09-02), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Reading, meaning and part of speech from JMdict, and kanji readings from KANJIDIC2 (EDRDG).
What the labels mean
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.