First opened Sunday, April 28, 2013
乙
おつ
- 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).
2nd in rank
Otsu, “2nd in rank”, is from Middle Chinese 乙 (MC 'it), and its modern slang sense is an aggressive clipping of お疲れ様です (otsukaresama desu).
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 乙
In a sentence
甲の薬は乙の毒。
One man's medicine is another man's poison.
甲の損は乙の得。
One man's gain is another man's loss.
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.
- “Originally from Middle Chinese 乙 (MC 'it), arising from the proper noun sense. Appears in texts from at least 833 CE.”
- “By extension from the moving tone noun sense. Appears in texts from the late Edo period, in the early 1800s.”
- “Derived as aggressive clipping of お疲れ様です (otsukaresama desu, used as a kind of greeting at work, literally “that's honorable exhaustion (from hard work)”). The use of 乙 for the spelling is an example of phonetic ateji (当(あ)て字(じ)).”
Source: Wiktionary: 乙 (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 乙 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not おつ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
きのと
- “Compound of 木 (Ki, “Wood”, one of the Five Elements) + の (no, attributive marker) + 弟 (oto, “younger brother”).”
おと
- “Cognate with the initial oto- in 劣る (otoru, “to be less than; to be younger than”), 落とす (otosu, “to drop something”). Also the first element in 弟 (otōto, “younger brother”).”
- “First attested in the Kojiki of 712.”
- “This is distinct from the initial oto- in 乙女(おとめ) (otome), which can instead be traced to an earlier woto- root, cognate with 復(を)つ (wotu).”
What the labels mean
- 漢語 Sino-Japanese
- Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Clipping
- A longer word or phrase shortened in everyday use.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.