First opened Wednesday, July 28, 2010
人
ひと
- flat (heiban)
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).
man, person
Hito went pi1to2 → fito → hito → çito, from Proto-Japonic *pitə.
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.
Written with 人
In a sentence
文は人なり。
The style is the man himself.
いい人です。
He is nice.
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.
- “⟨pi₁to₂⟩ → */pʲitə/ → /fito/ → /hito/ → /çito/”
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *pitə.”
- “First attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE.”
Source: Wiktionary: 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 人 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ひと. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
にん
- “From Early Middle Chinese 人 (MC nyin). The goon reading, so likely the initial borrowing. Compare Shanghainese nyin.”
じん
- “From Late Middle Chinese 人 (MC nyin). The kan'on reading, so likely a later borrowing. Compare Mandarin 人 (rén).”
たり・り
- “From Old Japanese. The protoform may have been -tari, see 三人 (mitari, literally “three people”).”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.