First opened Sunday, July 25, 2010
二人
ふたり
- tail-high (odaka): 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).
two people
Futari has three proposed derivations, one a shift from futa tari through put̚tari.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Wiktionary's text doesn't split this word, so each part is one of its kanji (with the okurigana written after it), with the reading and the dictionary meaning KANJIDIC2 gives that character — a word doesn't always use every sense of its kanji.
In a sentence
おふたりが幸せでありますように。
May you both be happy!
その編集者と発行者はふたりとも私のいとこです。
The editor and the publisher are both my cousins.
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.
- “From Old Japanese.”
- Hedged“* The most likely derivation is from 二 (futa, “2, two”) + 人 (-ri, counter for persons).”
- Hedged“* Alternatively, from 二 (fu, “2, two”, short-form) + 人 (-tari, counter for persons).”
- “* Yet another probable derivation would be a shift from 二 (futa, “2, two”) + 人 (-tari):”
- “*: /puta tari/ → */put̚tari/ → /putari/ → /futari/”
Source: Wiktionary: 二人 (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 二人 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ふたり. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ににん
- “Compound of Middle Chinese elements 二 (ni, “2, two”) + 人 (nin, “man, person”).”
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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.