First opened Friday, March 2, 2007
だって
だって
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.
but, because, even
Datte is a sound change of だとて (da to te), from だ (da) plus とて (to te, “even, also”).
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
だって好きなんだもの。
It's because I love you.
僕だって赤ん坊ではないぞ。
I was not born 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.
- “Sound change of だとて (da to te), compound of だ (da, “to be”, auxiliary verb) + とて (to te, “even, also”, binding particle).”
Source: Wiktionary: だって (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.