おる

Taken apart

No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.

In a sentence

We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.

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.

• “/woru/ → /oru/”
• “From Old Japanese. First attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE in the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) with the phonetic man'yōgana spelling of 袁理 (⟨wori⟩). Also attested in the Man'yōshū, completed some time after 759 CE.”
• “Listed in some sources as derived from the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) wi of verb wiru (modern いる (iru)) + ある (aru). The conjugation paradigm for woru is indeed the same as aru for Classical and Old Japanese. However, the resulting compounded *wiaru form would ordinarily become yaru or (w)eru via historical phonetic change, and the vowel shift to /o/ is unexplainable in this hypothesis.”
• Hedged“Alternatively, from *wu + ari or *wo + ari, where *wu or *wo is the root of the verb wiru (modern いる (iru), and ari is the Old Japanese form of modern ある (aru).”

Source: Wiktionary: おる (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.