First opened Saturday, November 28, 2009
名前
なまえ
- 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).
name
A name is “name” plus “front” — and its look-alike in English is a coincidence.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
名前は何ですか。
What's its name?
紹介者のお名前は？
What's the name of the person who recommended us to you?
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.
- “Derived from 名 (na, “name”) + 前 (mae, front). Compare the semantics of Latin praenomen.”
- “Appears as a term only in the last few centuries, becoming more widely used during the Meiji period.”
- “Similarity to English name and other Indo-European words derived from Proto-Indo-European *h₁nómn̥ is coincidental.”
Source: Wiktionary: 名前 (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.