First opened Tuesday, October 5, 2010
お父さん
おとうさん
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.
father (formal)
Otōsan began as o- plus 父 (toto) plus 様 (-sama); the long ō was an artificial step.
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 父
In a sentence
おとうさんには言わないでね。
Don't tell Father about this.
彼がおとうさんの代わりにその会合に出ました。
He attended the meeting for his father.
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.
- “Originally a compound of 御(お) (o-, “honorific prefix”) + 父(とと) (toto, “father”) + 様(さま) (-sama, “honorific suffix”).”
- “/ototosama/ → /otottsan/ → /otossan/”
- “The /otossan/ → /otoosan/ progression was artificial; regular Japanese sound changes generally would not allow this shift. The /otoosan/ form first appears in the early Meiji period in educational materials mandated by the 文部省 (Monbushō, “Ministry of Education”).”
Source: Wiktionary: お父さん (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).
What the labels mean
- 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.