First opened Tuesday, May 15, 2007
身分
みぶん
- 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).
position, status
Mibun appears to be a shift from older shinbun, swapping the on'yomi shin for the kun'yomi mi; first attested in 1688.
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
身分相応に暮らせ。
Cut your coat according to your cloth.
彼は身分の高い人です。
He is a man of high social status.
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“Appears to be a shift from older shinbun reading, replacing the on'yomi of shin for 身 with the kun'yomi of mi. First attested in 1688.”
Source: Wiktionary: 身分 (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 身分 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not みぶん. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
しんぶん
- “Borrowing from Middle Chinese 身分 (MC syin pjun|bjunH), modern Chinese spelling 身份 (shēnfèn). First attested in Japanese in 984. Superseded by the mibun reading starting from the late 1600s. The shinbun reading is included in a dictionary published in 1874, but it is not included in most modern references.”
What the labels mean
- 混種語 Hybrid
- Words that mix layers, e.g. a native part with a Chinese one.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.