First opened Monday, January 9, 2006
あるいは
あるいは
Pitch accent: We don't have the data for this section. No accent list gives this spelling and reading, or the two we check against disagree.
or, perhaps
Aruiwa is ある (aru, “to be, to exist”) plus a nominalizing い plus は (wa, topic marker), and arose from 漢文訓読.
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
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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.
- “ある (aru, “to be, to exist”, 連体形 (rentaikei) of the classical verb あり (ari)) + い (i, nominalizing suffix) + は (wa, topic marker). Arose from 漢文訓読 (kanbun kundoku).”
Source: Wiktionary: あるいは (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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.