First opened Sunday, May 27, 2012
美
び
- 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).
beauty
Bi, “beauty”, is from Middle Chinese 美 (MC mijX).
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 美
In a sentence
美は皮一重。
Beauty is only skin deep.
美はただ皮一枚。
Beauty is but skin deep.
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 美 (MC mijX).”
Source: Wiktionary: 美 (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 美 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not び. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
み
- “From Middle Chinese 美 (MC mijX).”
- “The use of this character as a suffix in given names is an ateji (当て字) for the native Japanese syllable み (mi), capitalizing on the character’s meaning of “beauty”. Morphologically, this み (mi) typically stems from one of three sources:”
- “* The Old Japanese feminine suffix み (‐mi).”
- “* The nominalizing suffix み (‐mi) attached to adjective stems (such as 宏 (hiro‐, “broad”) in 宏美 (Hiromi)).”
- “* The continuative form (連用形 (ren’yōkei)) of verbs ending in む (‐mu) (such as 恵む (megumu, “to bless”) becoming the noun 恵み (megumi, “blessing”) in 恵美 (Megumi)).”
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.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.