First opened Monday, February 18, 2008
目上
めうえ
- flat (heiban)
- tail-high (odaka): 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).
person of higher status; one's senior
Meue, “one's senior”, is 目 (me, “eye”) plus 上 (ue, “above”).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
彼は目上の人に対して丁重である。
He behaves respectfully toward his superiors.
ソレが年上や目上の者に対する態度か！
How dare you speak like that to your elders and betters!
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.
- “目(め) (me, “eye”) + 上(うえ) (ue, “above”)”
Source: Wiktionary: 目上 (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.