First opened Saturday, October 29, 2011
大方
おおかた
- 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).
almost all, majority
Ōkata is the classical stem 大 (ofo) plus 方 (kata, “direction, way, side”).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
彼の言っていることの大方に私は同感である。
I am in agreement with most of what he says.
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.
- “From 大(おほ) (ofo, stem of classical adjective 大(おほ)き (ofoki), modern 大(おお)きい (ōkii, “big”)) + 方(かた) (kata, “direction, way, side”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 大方 (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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.