First opened Sunday, January 28, 2007
嫌う
きらう
- 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 hate, to dislike, to loathe
Kirau is first attested in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE; the Daijiten lists it as cognate with 切る (kiru, “to cut”), but Samuel Martin thinks that unlikely.
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 嫌
In a sentence
自然は真空を嫌う。
Nature abhors a vacuum.
彼女は夫を嫌っていた。
She was down on her husband.
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. First attested in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE.”
- Hedged“Listed in the Daijiten as being cognate with 切る (kiru, “to cut”), perhaps via ふ (fu, repetitive verb suffix). However, Samuel Martin thinks this is unlikely.”
Source: Wiktionary: 嫌う (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.