First opened Friday, August 28, 2009
国民
こくみん
- 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).
national, people, citizen
“Citizen” came from Chinese — but a native “country” and “people” compound hides behind the same spelling.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Wiktionary's text doesn't split this word, so each part is one of its kanji (with the okurigana written after it), with the reading and the dictionary meaning KANJIDIC2 gives that character — a word doesn't always use every sense of its kanji.
In a sentence
日本人は勤勉な国民だ。
The Japanese are an industrious people.
国民は重税に苦しんだ。
The people groaned under the burden of heavy taxation.
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 國民 (MC kwok mjin).”
Source: Wiktionary: 国民 (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 国民 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not こくみん. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
くにたみ
- “Compound of native Japanese words: 国 (kuni, “country”) + 民 (tami, “people”)”
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.