First opened Thursday, June 4, 2009
真面目
まじめ
- 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).
diligent, serious
A serious face may be one with nervous, blinking eyes — and the kanji only fake the logic.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
In a sentence
彼は真面目な性格だ。
He is of a serious turn of mind.
彼はまじめな少年だ。
He is an earnest young man.
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 root maji, which is cognate with まじまじ (majimaji, “staringly”), 瞬ぐ (majirogu, “to wink”) + 目 (me, “eye; visually prominent feature”), from the sense of eyes blinking nervously when having a straight face. First attested in the Nise Monogatari, around 1639–1640.”
- “The kanji spelling is an example of jukujikun (熟(じゅく)字(じ)訓(くん)) mixed with ateji (当(あ)て字(じ)), from 真 (ma-, “real”) + 面 (“face”) + 目 (me, “eye”). Compare English true colours.”
Source: Wiktionary: 真面目 (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
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.