First opened Saturday, January 28, 2006
崩れる
くずれる
- 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 collapse, to crumble
Kuzureru comes from Old Japanese 崩る (kuduru).
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 崩
In a sentence
防御が崩れた。
Their defense came apart.
壁が地震で崩れた。
The wall gave way in the earthquake.
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.
- “⟨kuduru⟩ → /kuduru/ → /kud͡zuru/ → /kud͡zureru/”
- “From Old Japanese 崩る (kuduru), in the 下(しも)二(に)段(だん)活(かつ)用(よう) (shimo nidan katsuyō, “lower bigrade conjugation”) pattern.”
- “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.”
- “First attested in the 播(はり)磨(ま)風(ふ)土(ど)記(き) (Harima Fudoki, “Harima Fudoki”) (715 CE).”
- “Ultimately from 屑(くず) (kuzu, “rubbish, refuse, scrap, junk, waste”), and analyzable as etymologically meaning "to become rubbish". For the causative form 崩(くず)す (kuzusu), compare lay waste, ruin.”
Source: Wiktionary: 崩れる (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.