First opened Thursday, February 3, 2011
大人
おとな
- 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).
adult
Otona appears in sources from the Heian period, from Old Japanese.
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.
In a sentence
君はもう大人だ。
You are now an adult.
大人２枚ください。
Two adults, please.
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.
- “Appears in sources from the Heian period.”
- “From Old Japanese.”
Source: Wiktionary: 大人 (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 大人 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not おとな. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
うし
- “From Old Japanese. Appears in the Nihon Shoki, completed in 720 CE. Derivation unknown.”
たいじん
- “From Middle Chinese 大人 (dɑiᴴ ȵʑjen, literally “big, great + person”). Compare modern Hokkien 大人 (tāi-jîn / tāi-lîn), Cantonese 大人 (daai⁶ jan⁴).”
- “The kan'on reading, so likely a later borrowing.”
だいにん
- “From Middle Chinese 大人 (dɑiᴴ ȵiɪn, literally “big, great + person”). Compare modern Hakka 大人 (thai-ngìn).”
- “The goon reading, so likely an earlier 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.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.