First opened Friday, June 5, 2009
大勢
おおぜい
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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).
great number of people
A crowd got its おお from native Japanese, grafted onto a Chinese word.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Wiktionary's text doesn't split this word, so each part is one of its kanji (with the okurigana written after it), with the reading and the dictionary meaning KANJIDIC2 gives that character — a word doesn't always use every sense of its kanji.
In a sentence
大勢の人出ですよ。
We're filled to the rafters.
私の家族は大勢です。
My family is a large one.
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“Likely a shift in reading of taizei below, adopting the native-Japanese kun'yomi of ō for the first character.”
Source: Wiktionary: 大勢 (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 大勢 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not おおぜい. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
たいぜい
- “Shift in reading of taisei below. Ultimately from Middle Chinese 大勢 (MC dajH syejH). Uses the kan'yōon of zei for the second character, indicating a shift in pronunciation after borrowing.”
たいせい
- “From Middle Chinese 大勢 (MC dajH syejH). The kan'on, so likely the reading as borrowed from Chinese.”
What the labels mean
- 混種語 Hybrid
- Words that mix layers, e.g. a native part with a Chinese one.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.