First opened Saturday, May 26, 2007
お前
おまえ
- 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 (sing), presence (of a high personage)
Omae is literally “honourable presence in front of me”, originally a polite pronoun for emperors or gods, first attested in the early 900s.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Written with 前
In a sentence
おまえは首だ。
You're fired.
おまえを捕縛する。
You are under arrest.
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 御(お) (o-, honorific prefix) + 前(まえ) (mae, “front”), literally "honourable presence in front of me". Originally a polite pronoun applied to highly respected persons such as emperors or gods.”
- “First attested in the early 900s.”
Source: Wiktionary: お前 (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 お前 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not おまえ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
おめえ・おめ
- “/omae/ → /omeː/”
- “Corruption of お前(まえ) (omae). First attested in 1777.”
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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.