First opened Thursday, November 8, 2012
尊い
とうとい
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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).
precious, valuable, noble
Tōtoi is from Old Japanese, first attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE, and is possibly derived from 太い (futoi, “fat”).
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 尊
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “⟨taputo₁ki⟩ → */taɸutokʲi/ → /toːtoi/”
- “From Old Japanese. First attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE. From Early Middle Japanese adjective 尊(とうと)し (tōtoshi), with the 終(しゅう)止(し)形(けい) (shūshikei, “predicative form”) ending in し (shi) first replaced with the 連(れん)体(たい)形(けい) (rentaikei, “attributive form”) ending in き (ki), and then with the medial /-k-/ falling out to result in an ending of い (i).”
- Hedged“Possibly derived from 太い (futoi, “fat”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 尊い (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 尊い on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not とうとい. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
たっとい
- “Shift from the classical form of 尊(とうと)い (tōtoi) above: たふとし /tafutosi/ → たつとし /taQtosi/.”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.