First opened Sunday, June 4, 2006
私
わたくし
- flat (heiban)
How to read it: a line over a kana means the voice is high there, and ↓ marks where it drops. A kana with no line is low. With no ↓ the pitch stays high to the end and does not drop even on a following particle (が, は).
I (formal), myself, private affairs
Watakushi has no known source: a surface analysis suggests a compound, but no likely etyma are known.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
Written with 私
In a sentence
私は泳げません。
I don't know how to swim.
私は驚きのあまり口もきけなかった。
I was too surprised to speak.
Sentences are from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), picked by fixed rules from a dated export and shown unchanged. Nobody has reviewed them one by one.
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 私 (watakusi).”
- Hedged“A surface analysis suggests a compound term. However, no likely etyma are known.”
- Hedged“* From first-person pronoun 我 (wa, “I, me”) + takusi: although the first element seems likely, the original meaning of watakushi was “private”, as opposed to “public”, with no first-person pronoun usage until the late 13th century.”
- Hedged“* From 我(わ) (wa, “I, me”) + つ (tsu, “genitive marker”), and the other parts remain unknown.”
- Hedged“* From wata + kusi: the only phonetic matches are 綿 (wata, “cotton; cotton batting”), 腸 (wata, “guts, one's innards”, likely derived from the “batting” sense), 海 (wata, “sea, ocean”) + 串 (kusi, “skewer”), 奇し (kusi, “magic, fantastic, supernatural”, adjective), 酒 (kusi, “alcoholic beverage”, likely derived from the “magic” sense), 櫛 (kusi, “comb”).”
- Hedged“* The first element may come from 内(うち) (uchi, “one's own, my, our”), and the second element remains unknown.”
- “The meaning evolved over time from “private” or “privatization”, to refer to things that are personal, to refer to one's own person, and then finally to serve as a generic first-person pronoun. The full form watakushi is still used in modern Japanese as a formal, highly polite first-person pronoun. The abbreviated form watashi is now the most common and neutrally polite first-person pronoun.”
Source: Wiktionary: 私 (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).
Other readings of 私 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not わたくし. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
わたし
- “Shift from watakushi below.”
- “This reading was already prevalent in early modern times, possibly around the mid-late Muromachi to early-Edo period.”
し
- “/si/ → /ɕi/”
- “From Middle Chinese 私 (MC sij).”
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.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.