First opened Wednesday, October 7, 2009
人間
にんげん
- 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).
human being, person
A human being is, in Chinese, “people” plus “among”.
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
俺は人間だ。
I am a man.
彼は、人間です。
He is human.
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.
- “From Middle Chinese 人間 (MC nyin kean|keanH). Analyzable as a compound of "people" + "among; space".”
- Hedged“First cited to a text from 984. The kanji spelling is cited earlier in a kanbun passage in the Shoku Nihongi of 756, listed in some references with the reading jinkan. However, the extant copies of this work that include phonetic guides are centuries younger than this first date, raising the possibility that the ningen reading might itself date from 756.”
Source: Wiktionary: 人間 (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 人間 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not にんげん. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
じんかん
- “From Middle Chinese 人間 (MC nyin kean|keanH). Analyzable as a compound of "people" + "among; space".”
- “First cited in a kanbun passage in the Shoku Nihongi of 756, listed in some references with the reading jinkan. However, the extant copies of this work that include phonetic guides are centuries younger than this first date, raising the possibility that the jinkan reading might be younger than this date.”
ひとま
- “A compound of 人 (hito, “people”) + 間 (ma, “gap”). First cited to the Nihon Shoki of 720, and also attested in the Man'yōshū of 759.”
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.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.