First opened Saturday, December 15, 2012
幹部
かんぶ
- 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).
management, executive
Kanbu is a calque of French cadre (“executive, manager”), from 幹 (kan, “core, main part”) plus 部 (bu, “division, department”).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
彼はその問題について幹部の何人かと協議した。
He consulted with some of the staff on the matter.
党幹部らは、党組織の欠陥問題に取り組んでいます。
Party leaders are grappling with flaws in the party system.
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.
- “Calque of French cadre (“executive, manager”), from 幹(かん) (kan, “core, main part”) + 部(ぶ) (bu, “division, department”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 幹部 (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.
- Made in Japan
- Coined in Japan from foreign material (wasei-kango, wasei-eigo), not borrowed whole.