First opened Thursday, February 10, 2011
一番
いちばん
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
- 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).
best (most), first, number one
Ichiban is simply 一 (ichi) plus 番 (-ban).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Wiktionary's text doesn't split this word, so each part is one of its kanji (with the okurigana written after it), with the reading and the dictionary meaning KANJIDIC2 gives that character — a word doesn't always use every sense of its kanji.
In a sentence
健康が一番です。
Health is the most important thing.
時間は一番大切だ。
Time is the most precious thing.
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.
- “From 一(いち) (ichi) + 番(ばん) (-ban).”
Source: Wiktionary: 一番 (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 一番 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not いちばん. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
いっばん
- “Dialectal variation of standard Japanese ichiban.”
ひとつがい
- “Compound of 一 (hito, “one”) + 番 (tsugai, “pair, couple, brace”, 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 番(つが)う (tsugau)).”
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.