First opened Friday, May 22, 2009
二十歳
はたち
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
20 years old
Twenty years old is an Old Japanese “twenty items” — read as a single old word, not as nijū + sai.
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
彼は二十歳のときにこの本を書いた。
He wrote this book at the age of twenty.
我々日本人は二十歳で大人の年齢になる。
We Japanese come of age at twenty.
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.
- “From Old Japanese はたち (patati, “twenty items”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 二十歳 (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 二十歳 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not はたち. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
にじゅっさい・にじゅうさい
- “From 二十 (nijū, “twenty”) + 歳 (sai, “year”).”
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.