First opened Friday, February 5, 2010
兄弟
きょうだい
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
siblings (humble), brothers and sisters
Brothers have two readings, and they come from two waves of Chinese.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
兄弟はいるか。
Do you have any brothers?
父は５人兄弟です。
My father is one of five brothers.
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 兄 (kyō, “elder brother”, goon) + 弟 (dai, “younger brother”, goon), from Middle Chinese 兄弟.”
Source: Wiktionary: 兄弟 (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 兄弟 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not きょうだい. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
けいてい
- “From 兄 (kei, “elder brother”, kan'on) + 弟 (tei, “younger brother”, kan'on), from Chinese 兄弟. Compare 兄妹 (keimai, “elder brother and younger sister”), 姉弟 (shitei, “elder sister and younger brother”), and 姉妹 (shimai, “elder and younger sisters”).”
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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.