First opened Wednesday, August 15, 2007
間に合う
まにあう
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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).
to be in time for
Maniau is 間 (ma, “spatial interval, temporal interval”) plus に (ni) plus 合う (au, “to match, to fit”).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
汽車に間にあった。
I got there in time for the train.
ケンは間に合った。
Ken has made it.
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 間(ま) (ma, “spatial interval, temporal interval”) + に (ni, “to, at”, indirect object particle) + 合(あ)う (au, “to match, to fit”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 間に合う (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
- 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.