First opened Friday, October 16, 2026
一昨日
おととい
- 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).
the day before yesterday
Ototoi shifted from Old Japanese ototsui, and its kanji spelling is from issakujitsu.
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
その事故はおととい起きた。
The accident happened the day before yesterday.
おとといそこへ行きました。
I went there the day before yesterday.
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.
- “/wotot͡sufi/ → /wototofi/ → /wototowi/ → /ototoi/”
- “First cited to a text from roughly 953.”
- “Shift from Old Japanese ototsui (see Etymology 3 below).”
- “The kanji spelling is from issakujitsu (see Etymology 1 above).”
Source: Wiktionary: 一昨日 (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 一昨日 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not おととい. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
いっさくじつ
- “Compound of 一昨 (issaku-, “the previous... before...”) + 日 (jitsu, “day”).”
- “First cited to a text from 1275.”
おとつい
- “⟨woto₂ tu pi₁⟩ → */wotətupʲi/ → /wotot͡sufi/ → /otot͡suwi/ → /otot͡sui/”
- “First attested in the Man'yōshū (c. 759 CE).”
- “Originally a compound of 遠 (oto, “distant, distant past”) + つ (tsu, Old Japanese case-marker particle) + 日 (hi, “day”).”
- “The kanji spelling is from issakujitsu (see Etymology 1 above).”
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.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.