First opened Thursday, November 30, 2006
憧れる
あこがれる
- 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 long for, to yearn after
Akogareru is from 憧る (akugaru), originally 所 (aku) plus 離る (karu), a cognate of 枯れる (kareru).
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 憧
In a sentence
彼は都会の生活に憧れている。
He'd love to live in the city.
田舎の生活にとても憧れます。
Rural life appeals to me very much.
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.
- “From Old Japanese 憧る (akugaru).”
- “Originally a compound of 所(あく) (aku) and 離(か)る (karu), the latter a cognate of 枯(か)れる (kareru).”
Source: Wiktionary: 憧れる (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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.