First opened Monday, August 16, 2010
男
おとこ
- 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).
man, male
Otoko may be おと (oto, “young?”) plus 子 (ko, “child”), compared with 少女 (otome).
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 男
In a sentence
彼は果報な男だ。
He's a lucky guy.
男は社会を形成する。
The men form a society.
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.
- “⟨woto₂ko₁⟩ → */wotəkʷo/ → /wotoko/ → /otoko/”
- “From Old Japanese.”
- “Derived from おと (oto, “young?”, cognate with Old Japanese 復つ (wotu → otsu, “to become young again”)) + 子(こ) (ko, “child”).”
- “Compare 少(おと)女(め) (otome, “young woman”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 男 (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 男 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not おとこ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
お
- “/wo/ → /o/”
- “From Old Japanese.”
おのこ
- “Compound of 男 (o, “male”, see above) + の (no, possessive particle) + 子 (ko, “child”).”
なん
- “/nam/ → /namʉ/ → /naɴ/”
- “From Middle Chinese 男 (MC nom).”
- “The 呉音 (goon) reading, so likely the initial borrowing.”
だん
- “/dam/ → /damʉ/ → /daɴ/”
- “From Middle Chinese 男 (MC nom).”
- “The 漢音 (kan'on) reading, so likely a later borrowing.”
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.