First opened Tuesday, October 11, 2005
大臣
だいじん
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
cabinet minister
Daijin is from Middle Chinese 大臣 (MC dajH dzyin).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Wiktionary's text doesn't split this word, so each part is one of its kanji (with the okurigana written after it), with the reading and the dictionary meaning KANJIDIC2 gives that character — a word doesn't always use every sense of its kanji.
In a sentence
私は大臣自身と話した。
I spoke to the minister himself.
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 Middle Chinese 大臣 (MC dajH dzyin).”
Source: Wiktionary: 大臣 (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 大臣 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not だいじん. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
おおおみ
- “From 大 (ō-, “big, great”) + 臣 (omi, “vassal”).”
おおいもうちぎみ
- “Compound of 大 (ōi-, prefix of superiority) + 公卿 (mōchigimi, “senior court official”).”
おおまえつぎみ
- “Shift from Old Japanese 大臣 (opomape₁tuki₁mi₁).”
- “Equivalent to 大 (ō-, “big, great”) + 公卿 (maetsugimi, ancient pronunciation of mōchigimi, “senior court official who serves before the Emperor”).”
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.
- 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).
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.