First opened Monday, December 27, 2010
前
まえ
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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, in front
Mae is a compound of 目 (ma, “eye”) plus 方 (pe1, “direction, -wards”) in Old Japanese.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
Written with 前
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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.
- “/mape/ → /mafe/ → /mae/”
- “From Old Japanese as a compound of 目 (ma, “eye”) + 方 (pe₁, “direction, -wards”). Ultimately from Proto-Japonic *mapia.”
- “/mape₁/ → /maɸe/ → /mawe/ → /maje/ → /mae/”
Source: Wiktionary: 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 前 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not まえ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ぜん
- “From Middle Chinese 前 (MC dzen). Compare modern Mandarin 前 (qián).”
ぜ
- “Contraction of 御(ご)前(ぜ) (goze), itself a contraction of 御(ご)前(ぜん) (go-zen), an honorific form of address.”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.