First opened Wednesday, June 21, 2006
方々
かたがた
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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).
persons
Katagata is a reduplication of 方 (kata, “person”), with kata voiced to gata.
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.
Written with 方
In a sentence
天皇は亡くなった方々の霊に祈りを捧げた。
The Emperor prayed for the souls of the deceased.
あの人たちが昨日あなたが会った方々ですか。
Are those the people you saw yesterday?
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.
- “Reduplication of 方(かた) (kata, “person”). The kata changes to gata as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
Source: Wiktionary: 方々 (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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).