First opened Sunday, December 6, 2009
沢山
たくさん
- 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).
many, much
“Many” is in The Tale of the Heike — and its origin is unknown.
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
たくさん欲しい。
I want a lot.
金はたくさんある。
There is a lot of money.
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.
- “First appears in The Tale of the Heike (c. late 12th century).”
- Hedged“Origin unknown, kanji spelling appears to be phonetic ateji (当(あ)て字(じ))”
Source: Wiktionary: 沢山 (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 沢山 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not たくさん. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
さわやま
- “First appeared in the Edo period.”
- “Kun-reading of takusan above.”
What the labels mean
- 漢語 Sino-Japanese
- Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.