First opened Tuesday, October 27, 2009
一人
ひとり
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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).
one person
“One person” has a look-alike in Old Japanese: pi1dari, which became hidari.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
彼は彼らのひとり息子です。
He is the only child they have.
彼女は部屋にひとりにされた。
She was left alone in the room.
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.”
- “Derived from 一 (hito, “one, 1”) + 人 (-ri, counter for persons).”
- “Compare Old Japanese 一人 (pi₁dari → hidari).”
Source: Wiktionary: 一人 (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 一人 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ひとり. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
いちにん
- “From Middle Chinese 一人 (MC 'jit nyin).”
いちじん
- “Compound of Middle Chinese elements 一 (ichi, “one, 1”, goon reading) + 人 (jin, “person”, kan'on reading).”
かずと・かずひと
- “Various nanori readings.”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.