First opened Friday, November 25, 2011
主人公
しゅじんこう
Pitch accent: We don't have the data for this section. No accent list gives this spelling and reading, or the two we check against disagree.
protagonist
Shujinkō is from Middle Chinese 主人公 (MC tsyuX nyin kuwng).
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
主人公は、本の最後で死んだ。
The hero died at the end of the book.
その劇は主人公の死で終わる。
The play concludes with the hero's death.
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 Middle Chinese 主人公 (MC tsyuX nyin kuwng).”
Source: Wiktionary: 主人公 (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.