First opened Wednesday, January 4, 2012
人質
ひとじち
- 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).
hostage
Hitojichi is 人 (hito, “person”) plus 質 (shichi, “pawn, hock”), and first meant “indentureship”, with “hostage” arising by extension.
Taken apart
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In a sentence
人質は解放されるだろう。
The hostages will be released.
人質は無事全員解放された。
All the hostages were released unharmed.
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.
- “Compound of 人 (hito, “person”) + 質 (shichi, “pawn, hock”). The shichi changes to jichi as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
- “The original sense was “indentureship”, from the sense of a person being as if in pawn until a debt is paid. The “hostage” sense then arose by extension, from the person being in pawn until a ransom is paid or some other condition is met.”
Source: Wiktionary: 人質 (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
- 混種語 Hybrid
- Words that mix layers, e.g. a native part with a Chinese one.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).