First opened Wednesday, July 4, 2012
人民
じんみん
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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).
people, public
Jinmin is from the Middle Chinese compound 人民, formerly read ninmin in the goon reading and later jinmin in a mixed reading.
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
主権は人民にある。
Sovereignty resides in the people.
王は人民を抑圧した。
The king oppressed his people.
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 compound 人民 (MC nyin mjin). Compare modern Mandarin 人民 (rénmín), Wu 人民 (⁶zen-min₆), Min Nan 人民 (jîn-bîn).”
- “Formerly pronounced with a consistent 呉音 (goon) reading of ninmin, later changing to a mixed 漢音 (kan'on) / 呉音 (goon) reading of jinmin.”
Source: Wiktionary: 人民 (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.