自分
Meaning in Englishoneself, myself, yourself
Animated kanji stroke order
Related sentences
Word context
What it means
What does 自分 (jibun) mean? 自分 (jibun) denotes a person's own self, perspective, actions, or belongings and functions as a word that points back to the individual in question; depending on context it can act like a noun or a reflexive/possessive reference in English.
Main meanings
- 1. Possessive nuance when paired with の to mark something as belonging to the person referred to.
- 2. Indicates agency or means when used with the particle で, conveying doing something by oneself.
- 3. Casual first-person usage for 'I' or 'me' in spoken Japanese depending on speaker identity and formality.
- 4. Used in contrastive or emphatic contexts to highlight the subject's own role or responsibility.
- 5. Appears in idiomatic expressions to refer to one’s abilities, limits, or personal feelings.
How to use it
Used across spoken and written Japanese but varies by formality: common in everyday speech and neutral writing, often replaced by more formal terms in polite contexts; pairs frequently with particles like の (possession), で (means/agency), は/が (topic/subject) and appears in fixed expressions to indicate doing something oneself or referring to one's own feelings or responsibility.
Variants and close terms
- 自己 (jiko): self (more abstract, formal)
- 自身 (jishin): oneself (emphatic, often written)
- 本人 (honnin): the person in question (identification)
- 他人 (tanin): other person (antonym)
- 俺 (ore): informal masculine pronoun often used instead of jibun for 'I' in casual speech
Composition
- 自: originally means 'self' or 'from oneself', conveys personal origin or reflexivity.
- 分: means 'part', 'division', or 'share' and here gives the sense of 'one's portion' or 'one's side'.
- Together they form the idea of the individual's own part or self, giving the compound its core meaning of 'oneself' or 'one's own'.
Origin
The compound was adopted into Japanese through Classical Chinese writing and appears in early written records; over centuries it became a common way to express the individual's relation to actions and possessions in both literary and colloquial registers.
Word class
pronoun / noun (代名詞・名詞)