First opened Wednesday, May 24, 2006
凍る
こおる
- flat (heiban)
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 freeze, to be frozen over, to congeal
Kōru is from Old Japanese 凍る (koporu), likely cognate with words for hard and stiff such as 凝る (koru, “to stiffen”).
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 凍
In a sentence
湖は凍っていた。
The lake was frozen.
凍るように冷たい。
It is freezing cold.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “From Old Japanese 凍る (koporu).”
- Hedged“Likely cognate with other terms beginning with ko- and related to senses of hard, stiff, such as 凝(こ)る (koru, “to stiffen”), 凍(こ)ゆ (koyu, “to freeze, to become frozen”, classical) → modern 凍(こご)える (kogoeru), 強(こわ)い (kowai, “hard, tough, stiff”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 凍る (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.