First opened Friday, August 1, 2008
あなた
あなた
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.
you
“You” began as a place word: あなた originally meant that direction, that side, that place far away.
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.
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.
- Hedged“Compound of あ (a, distal pronoun marker, indicating something far away from both speaker and listener; also found in あれ (are, “that”, far away), あそこ (asoko, “there”, far away), etc.) + な (na, possessive, ancient compounding alternative for (and possibly derived from) particle の (no)) + た (ta, “direction, side, place”, only found in ancient terms; possibly contracted from 方 (kata)).”
- “Originally meant that direction, that side, that place (far away), in contrast to そなた (sonata, “that direction, that side, that place (closer to the listener)”), こなた (konata, “this direction, this side, this place (close to both listener and speaker)”), and どなた (donata, “which or what direction, side, or place”). Appears with this sense at least as early as the Kokin Wakashū of the late 900s, and the Kagerō Nikki of 974 CE.”
- “The indirect and polite sense of that person is also evident in texts from the late 900s, including the Ochikubo Monogatari.”
- “The sense of you as a polite and indirect form of reference appears in texts from around the 1750s.”
Source: Wiktionary: あなた (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.