First opened Sunday, March 23, 2008
ちゃんと
ちゃんと
- 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).
perfectly, properly, exactly
Chanto has a hypothetical etymology: possibly a sound shift from 順当 (juntō, “properly, in a smooth way”).
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
ちゃんと座ってろ。
Sit tight.
私がちゃんとやるから。
I'll fix it up all right.
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.
- Hedged“This etymology is hypothetical. Possibly some kind of sound shift from 順当 (juntō, “properly, in a smooth way”).”
- “/dʑɯntoː/ → /dʑɯnto/ → /tɕanto/”
Source: Wiktionary: ちゃんと (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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.