First opened Saturday, January 21, 2006
命じる
めいじる
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.
to order, to command, to appoint
Meijiru shifted from 命ずる (meizuru), as an s-irregular verb ending in -uru became an upper monograde verb in -iru.
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.
Written with 命
In a sentence
回れ右を命じる。
I order you to turn right.
議長は静粛を命じた。
The chairperson ordered silence.
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.
- “Shift from verb 命ずる (meizuru), by natural progression from サ行変格活用 (sa-gyō henkaku katsuyō, “s-irregular conjugation”) verbs ending in -uru to 上一段活用 (kami ichidan katsuyō, “upper monograde conjugation”) verbs ending in -iru.”
Source: Wiktionary: 命じる (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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.