First opened Monday, July 20, 2009
双子
ふたご
- 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).
twins, a twin
Twins are a “set of two” “children”, with こ voiced to ご.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
私はそのふたごのどちらも知らない。
I don't know either twin.
あなたはトムと彼のふたごの兄弟とを区別できますか。
Can you tell Tom from his twin brother?
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.
- “双(ふた) (futa, “set of two”) + 子(こ) (ko, “child”)”
- “The ko changes to go as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
Source: Wiktionary: 双子 (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.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).