First opened Monday, November 30, 2009
手前
てまえ
- 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).
before, this side
“Before” began as “what lies just in front of your hand”.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
手前にひいて開けてください。
Pull it open.
あの信号の手前で降ろしてください。
Please let me off on this side of that traffic light.
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.
- “Compound of Old Japanese elements 手 (te, “hand”) + 前 (mae, “front”), originally meaning “that which is just in front of one's hand”.”
Source: Wiktionary: 手前 (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).
Other readings of 手前 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not てまえ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
てめえ
- “Corruption of temae. The vowel shift emphasizes the confrontational sense of the term. This flattening of diphthongs to monophthongs is characteristic of Tokyo's Shitamachi dialect. Compare おめえ (omē, from お前 (omae)), ねえ (nē, from ない), やべえ (yabē, from やばい (yabai)).”
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.