First opened Friday, September 24, 2010
誰
だれ
- 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).
who
Dare was tare until around the Edo period, voiced by analogy with 何れ (dore) and 何処 (doko).
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 誰
In a sentence
だれの番だ。
Whose go is it?
だれが悪いのか。
Who is in fault?
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.
- “/tare/ → /dare/”
- “From earlier tare.”
- Hedged“The dare form appears from around the Edo period. The voicing of the initial /t-/ to /d-/ is likely by analogy with other interrogative demonstratives 何れ (dore, “which one”), 何処 (doko, “where”). See etymology 2”
- “Now the primary form, replacing earlier tare.”
Source: Wiktionary: 誰 (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 誰 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not だれ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
たれ
- “From Old Japanese, first attested in the Kojiki (712 CE) alongside its older form ta (see below).”
- “Derived from older 誰 (ta, “who”) + れ (re, “thing”, demonstrative nominalizer ending). Compare the formation of これ (kore, “this”) from 此 (ko, “this”) + れ (re), 彼 (kare, “that one, that person”) from 彼 (ka, “that”) + れ (re), etc.”
- “Superseded by dare above starting from around the Edo period. The tare form does not appear to be used anymore outside of poetry or intentionally archaic text.”
た
- “From Old Japanese, first attested in the Kojiki, completed roughly 712 CE.”
- “Appears to be the oldest form.”
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.