First opened Saturday, October 20, 2007
参る
まいる
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
humble expression for 行く and 来る
Mairu, the humble “to go”, is a compound of mawi (參, “to go, particularly to the place or person of a social superior”) and 入る (iru).
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 参
In a sentence
君には参るよ。
You got me!
すぐ参ります。
I'm coming.
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.
- “⟨mawi iru⟩ → /mawiru/ → /mairu/”
- “From Old Japanese. First attested in the Nihon Shoki of 720.”
- “Originally a compound of 參(まい) (mawi → mai, the 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of Old Japanese verb 參る (mawiru → mairu, “to go, particularly to the place or person of a social superior”, humble)) + 入(い)る (iru, “to enter”). Old Japanese did not allow vowel clusters, resulting in the shortening of mawi iru to mawiru. See the Old Japanese entry for the etymology of the original mawiru, not to be confused with the mawiru contracted from mawi iru.”
- “The transitive senses are obsolete in modern Japanese.”
Source: Wiktionary: 参る (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.
- Clipping
- A longer word or phrase shortened in everyday use.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.