First opened Monday, May 15, 2006
例えば
たとえば
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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).
for example, e.g.
Tatoeba is the irregular -ba conditional of 例える (tatoeru, “to liken one thing to another”), attested by the Kokin Wakashū of about 920 CE.
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 例
In a sentence
例えば、君は英語が好きですか。
For example, do you like English?
例えば、これは一本のペンです。
For example, this is a pen.
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.
- “Analyzable as the irregular -ba conditional conjugation of verb 例える (tatoeru, “to compare something, to liken one thing to another, to make a metaphor about something”).”
- “Historically, the term appears from at least the late Heian period in the Kokin Wakashū dated roughly 920 CE, indicating that the original derivation was as the regular -ba conditional conjugation of Old Japanese-derived verb 例ふ (tatofu), conjugated in the 下二段活用 (shimo nidan katsuyō, “lower bigrade conjugation”) pattern. Through regular historical processes, classical 例ふ (tatofu) evolved into modern 例える (tatoeru).”
Source: Wiktionary: 例えば (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.