First opened Wednesday, January 25, 2006
数える
かぞえる
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
How to read it: a line over a kana means the voice is high there, and ↓ marks where it drops. A kana with no line is low. With no ↓ the pitch stays high to the end and does not drop even on a following particle (が, は).
to count
Kazoeru began as kazu apu, and took six steps to reach kazoeru.
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 数
In a sentence
ひなを数えるな。
Don't count your chickens.
人数を数えてます。
I'm counting the number of people.
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.
- “/kazu apu/ → /kazo₁pu/ → /kazoɸu/ → /kazwoɸuru/ → /kazo(w)uru/ → /kazoweru/ → /kazoeru/”
- “Inherited from Old Japanese.”
- “Development”
- “Natural progression from Old and Classical Japanese 下(しも)二(に)段(だん)活(かつ)用(よう) (shimo nidan katsuyō, “lower bigrade conjugation”) verbs ending in -u to modern Japanese 下(しも)一(いち)段(だん)活(かつ)用(よう) (shimo ichidan katsuyō, “lower monograde conjugation”) verbs ending in -eru. For the Old / Classical form, see the 数ふ entry.”
- “Equivalent to 数(かず) (kazu, “number”) + あう (au, “to join”). The earliest attestation of this verb uses the 下(しも)二(に)段(だん) (shimonidan, “lower bigrade”) conjugation pattern, suggesting an irregular shift from the 四(よ)段(だん) (yodan, “quadrigrade”) conjugation pattern of compounded verb あふ (afu, modern あう (au)). Compare the sporadic shift of the auxiliary verb ふ (-fu, expressing repetition or ongoing state) to える (-eru) in some terms.”
Source: Wiktionary: 数える (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
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.