First opened Thursday, November 23, 2006
君
きみ
- 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).
you (informal for men)
Kimi is possibly a borrowing from the Sillan word for king, written 今 (kum), whose morpheme survives in Korean 임금 (imgeum).
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 君
In a sentence
君次第だよ。
It's up to you.
君の番だよ。
It's your move.
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.
- “⟨ki₁mi₁⟩ → */kʲimʲi/ → /kimi/”
- Hedged“From Old Japanese. Possibly a borrowing from the Sillan word for king, written with the character 今 (kum). The same morpheme survives in the second syllable of the Modern Korean word 임금 (imgeum).”
Source: Wiktionary: 君 (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 君 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not きみ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ぎみ
- “The kimi changes to gimi as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
くん
- “From Middle Chinese 君 (MC kjun).”
きんじ
- “/kimud͡ʑi/ → /kind͡ʑi/”
- “Shift from older きむぢ (kimudi → kimuji).”
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.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.