First opened Thursday, August 17, 2006
酔っ払い
よっぱらい
- 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).
drunkard
Yopparai is the continuative stem of 酔っ払う (yopparau).
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.
In a sentence
その酔っ払いはまっすぐ歩けなかった。
The drunken man couldn't walk straight.
酔っぱらいはよろよろと彼のところへやって来た。
The drunk rolled up to him.
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.
- “連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 酔(よ)っ払(ぱら)う (yopparau).”
Source: Wiktionary: 酔っ払い (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).