First opened Friday, August 6, 2010
三つ
みっつ
Pitch accent: We don't have the data for this section. No accent list gives this spelling and reading, or the two we check against disagree.
three things
Mittsu is a shift from the previous 三つ (mitsu).
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 三
In a sentence
これを三つください。
I'd like three of these.
東京駅は三つ目です。
Tokyo Station is the third stop.
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.
- “Shift from previous 三(み)つ (mitsu).”
Source: Wiktionary: 三つ (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 三つ on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not みっつ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
みつ
- “From Old Japanese.”
- “By surface analysis, 三 (mi, “three”) + つ (tsu, generic counter word).”
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.