First opened Monday, September 26, 2005
たちまち
たちまち
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.
instantly, suddenly, all at once
Tachimachi is apparently a shift from 立ち待ち (tachimachi, “standing and waiting”), first cited in the Man'yōshū of 759.
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. First cited to the Man'yōshū of 759.”
- Hedged“Apparently a shift from 立ち待ち (tachimachi, “standing and waiting”), the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) of compound verb 立ち待つ (tachimatsu, “to wait while standing”), probably from the idea of being at the ready. In older texts, this was always followed by the adverbial particle に (ni) for all senses.”
Source: Wiktionary: たちまち (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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.