人
Meaning in Englishperson, people
Animated kanji stroke order
Related sentences
Word context
What it means
人 (hito) means a person or human being and refers to an individual human or the idea of a human agent; it is used to identify someone (or people collectively) as distinct from objects, animals, or roles and functions as a basic lexical unit for talking about persons in Japanese.
Main meanings
- Collective sense: people, population or mankind as a group rather than a single individual.
- Agent or actor: the person who performs an action or holds a responsibility in a situation.
- Abstract individual: an unspecified or generic person, similar to English “someone” or “one.”
- Technical/legal sense: a human entity distinguished from organizations or things in administrative and social contexts.
How to use it
Used daily to refer to an individual (hito) in speech and writing, to denote persons in signs and descriptions, and embedded in compound words to form terms for professions, social groups and abstract human categories; it's common across casual, neutral and formal registers (choice of surrounding words and honorifics adjusts politeness rather than the character itself).
Variants and close terms
- 人間 (ningen) — human being, often used for the human condition or whole person.
- 者 (mono) — person, often formal or used in compounds to denote a person of a certain type.
- 人々 (hitobito) — people, explicitly plural and emphatic.
- 人類 (jinrui) — humankind, used for the species or collective humanity.
Composition
The character is a simple pictograph representing a standing or walking person and functions as a kanji and as a radical; its standalone form reads hito (kunyomi) while in compounds it often appears with on-yomi readings such as jin and nin, and the left-side variant 亻serves as the ‘person’ radical indicating human-related meaning in many multi-kanji compounds.
Origin
The character was adopted into Japanese with Chinese writing during the early centuries of kanji introduction (roughly 4th–7th century CE) and appears in classical texts and bureaucratic records as the primary symbol for a human being; its use spread with literacy, official documents and Buddhist and Confucian texts, becoming foundational in Japanese vocabulary for persons and social categories.
Word class
noun (名詞)