First opened Wednesday, October 31, 2012
身の上
みのうえ
- flat (heiban)
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 4
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).
one's future, one's welfare, one's personal history
Minoue is 身 (mi) plus の (no) plus 上 (ue).
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.
In a sentence
彼の身の上に何があったか誰も知らない。
No one knows what has happened to him.
彼女は深呼吸してから、身の上を語り始めた。
She took a deep breath and then started to talk about herself.
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.
- “身(み) (mi) + の (no) + 上(うえ) (ue)”
Source: Wiktionary: 身の上 (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
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.