First opened Thursday, October 15, 2009
美人
びじん
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
- 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).
beautiful person (woman)
A “beautiful person” has a native twin spelled the same way: “good-faced person”.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
美人だなあ。
She is beautiful.
美人でもある。
She's also a beauty.
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 美人 (MC mijX nyin, literally “beautiful (especially feminine) + person”). Compare modern Min Nan reading bí-jîn.”
- Hedged“The kan'on reading, so likely a later borrowing.”
Source: Wiktionary: 美人 (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 美人 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not びじん. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
かおよびと
- “Compound of 顔 (kao, “face”) + 良 (yo, “good”, the stem of adjective 良い yoi, “good”) + 人 (hito, “person”). The hito changes to bito as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
- “The 美 kanji spelling for the kaoyo portion of the reading is an example of jukujikun.”
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.