First opened Friday, December 17, 2010
夫
おっと
- flat (heiban)
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).
husband
Otto was wofito, a compound of 男 (wo, “male, man”) plus 人 (fito, “person”), first attested in roughly 1220.
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 夫
In a sentence
彼女は夫と離婚した。
She divorced her husband.
君を娘の夫にしよう。
You shall be my daughter's husband.
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 older unattested 男(を)人(ひと) (wofito), synchronically analyzable as a compound of 男(を) (wo → o, “male, man”) + 人(ひと) (fito → hito, “person”).”
- “Ultimately from Proto-Japonic *wopitə, with many Ryukyuan cognates.”
- “First attested in roughly 1220.”
Source: Wiktionary: 夫 (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 夫 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not おっと. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
つま
- “From Old Japanese. First attested in the Kojiki of 712.”
- “Cognate with 端 (tsuma, “edge, side of something”), from the sense of "person by one's side".”
- “Generally spelled 夫 in reference to a husband and 妻 in reference to a wife.”
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.