First opened Monday, September 27, 2010
有名
ゆうめい
- 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).
famous
Yūmei is likely from Middle Chinese 有名, literally “to have + name”.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
私の妹は有名だ。
My sister is famous.
彼は有名になった。
He became famous.
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.
- Hedged“Likely from Middle Chinese compound 有名 (hjuw^X mjeng, literally “to have + name”). Compare modern Mandarin reading yǒumíng.”
Source: Wiktionary: 有名 (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
- 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.