First opened Tuesday, November 27, 2007
平凡
へいぼん
- 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).
common, ordinary
Heibon is Middle Chinese 平凡, literally “even, flat + in every case”.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
彼はまったく平凡な男だ。
He is just an ordinary person.
それはごく平凡な物語だ。
It's just another story.
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 Middle Chinese compound 平凡 (bjæng bjom, literally “even, flat + in every case”). Compare modern Min Nan reading pêng-hôan.”
Source: Wiktionary: 平凡 (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.