First opened Sunday, September 3, 2006
本人
ほんにん
- 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).
the person himself
Honnin is possibly from Middle Chinese, or composed in Japan from Sinitic elements, and is first cited to roughly 1215.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
彼本人がやってきた。
He came in person.
私はその女優本人に話しかけた。
I spoke to the actress herself.
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“Possibly from Middle Chinese, or composed in Japan of Sinitic elements: 本 (hon, “main; real; the one under discussion”) + 人 (nin, “person”). Compare modern Mandarin 本人 (běnrén).”
- “First cited to roughly 1215.”
Source: Wiktionary: 本人 (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).
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.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.