First opened Monday, November 29, 2010
弟
おとうと
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 4
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).
younger brother
Otōto was otopito, from 弟 (oto, “younger sibling”) plus 人 (hito, “person”).
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 弟
In a sentence
彼は私と弟を取り違えた。
He mistook me for my younger brother.
東京の郊外に住む両親や弟は大震災で死んだ。
My parents and little brother, who lived in the suburbs of Tokyo, died in the big earthquake.
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.
- “/otopito/ → /otoɸito/ → /otowito/ → /*otowuto/ → /otouto/ → /otoːto/”
- “Originally a compound of 弟 (oto, “younger sibling”) + 人 (hito, “person”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 弟 (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
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.