First opened Wednesday, November 25, 2009
一言
ひとこと
- 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 word
ひとこと is the native reading; the same spelling also has Chinese-derived readings, one likely borrowed first.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
ひとこと多いんだよ。
That last comment was pushing it.
ひとこと君に忠告させて欲しい。
Let me give you a bit of advice.
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.
- “Compound of 一(ひと) (hito, “one”) + 言(こと) (koto, “word, speech”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 一言 (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 一言 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ひとこと. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
いちごん
- “From Middle Chinese compound 一言 (MC ʔjit ngjon, literally “one + speech, word”). The goon, so likely the initial borrowing.”
いちげん
- “Shift in pronunciation from ichigon above, using the kan'on of gen for the 言 character.”
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.