First opened Sunday, October 23, 2005
姓
せい
- 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).
surname, family name
Sei, “surname”, is from Middle Chinese 姓, the kan'on reading, so likely a later borrowing.
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 姓
In a sentence
彼女は結婚前スミス姓だった。
She was a Smith before her marriage.
あなたの姓が聞き取れなかった。
I didn't get your last name.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- Hedged“From Middle Chinese 姓 (MC sjengH). The kan'on, so likely a later borrowing. Compare modern Min Nan reading sèⁿ.”
Source: Wiktionary: 姓 (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 姓 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not せい. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
かばね
- “From Old Japanese.”
- “Ultimate derivation unclear. Some theories derive this as a Japanese compound of 株 (kabu, “stock, root”) + 根 (ne, “root, origin”) or 名 (na, “name”). However, the required /u/ → /a/ sound shift would be unusual.”
- “Another thought is that this might be a borrowing from, or somehow otherwise related to, Korean 골품 (golpum), a Sino-Korean term also spelled 骨品 (literally “bones + goods”), the name for a kind of kinship hierarchy that was prevalent in the Silla kingdom. This latter theory and its related “bone” sense might also account for the homophony with 屍 (kabane, “corpse, dead body”).”
しょう
- “/siau/ → /ɕjɔː/ → /ɕoː/”
- “From Middle Chinese 姓 (MC sjengH). The goon, so likely the initial borrowing. Compare modern Hakka reading siang.”
- “This reading is less common than sei above.”
そう
- “A shift from shō above to use the 直音 (chokuon, “"straight" pronunciation”, dropping out any /j/ or /w/ glides).”
- “This reading is not used in modern Japanese, and is only found in historical texts, such as the Utsubo Monogatari from the late 900s.”
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.