明年
míng nián
In real, traceable use. Part of the curated seed collection; community review is coming.
Next year, the year after this one. It goes before the verb: 我明年学开车 'I'll learn to drive next year'. In time words, 明 'bright' means 'next': 明天 is 'tomorrow'.
Năm sau, năm tới, sang năm. Đứng trước động từ: 我明年学开车 (sang năm tôi học lái xe). Trong từ chỉ thời gian, 明 (vốn nghĩa là “sáng”) mang nghĩa “tới, sau”: 明天 là “ngày mai”.
NounRegister: neutral
Examples
Editorial example (illustrative, not a corpus attestation) — awaiting a native-speaker check
Sources & notes
Hán-Việt bridge batch 064 (2026-11-14). Headword, Traditional form and pinyin checked against CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0) source ↗ · Hán-Việt reading: Unihan kVietnamese source ↗ ; en.wiktionary Vietnamese entries via kaikki.org extract, snapshot 2026-07-31 (CC BY-SA 4.0): Hán-Việt reading 年 = niên · No Vietnamese entry is linked as its twin; the Hán-Việt reading is given character by character. Definition, literal gloss and example sentence are original; the example has not had a native-speaker check yet.
Common questions
What does “明年” mean?
Next year, the year after this one. It goes before the verb: 我明年学开车 'I'll learn to drive next year'. In time words, 明 'bright' means 'next': 明天 is 'tomorrow'. Literally: bright year
Is “明年” formal or informal?
明年 is generally neutral.