First opened Saturday, February 23, 2008
蹴る
ける
- 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).
to kick
Keru is from the Old Japanese verb 蹴う (kuu), from Proto-Japonic *kuw-a-.
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 蹴
In a sentence
背中を蹴られた。
I was kicked in the back.
彼女はドアを蹴った。
She kicked the door.
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.
- “*/kuwu/ → /kuweru/ → /kʷeru/ → /keru/”
- “From Old Japanese verb 蹴う (kuu), from Proto-Japonic *kuw-a-.”
- “Development”
- “Natural progression from Old and Classical Japanese 下(しも)二(に)段(だん)活(かつ)用(よう) (shimo nidan katsuyō, “lower bigrade conjugation”) verbs ending in -u to modern Japanese 下(しも)一(いち)段(だん)活(かつ)用(よう) (shimo ichidan katsuyō, “lower monograde conjugation”) verbs ending in -eru.”
- “The conjugation shifted from 下二段活用 (shimo nidan katsuyō, “bigrade conjugation”) (/kuwe-/, /kuu/) to 下一段活用 (shimo ichidan katsuyō, “monograde conjugation”) (/kʷe-/, /kʷeru/) in Early Middle Japanese. This verb was the only shimo ichidan verb in Early Middle Japanese.”
- “Pronunciation of /kʷe/ changed to /ke/ before around 1300.”
- “The conjugation irregularly shifted from 下一段活用 (shimo ichidan katsuyō, “monograde conjugation”) (/ke-/, /keru/) to 四段活用 (yodan katsuyō, “quadrigrade conjugation”) (/ker-/, /keru/) after the early Edo period. Remnants of the monograde conjugation can still be seen in various compounds, such as 足蹴(あしげ) (ashige) or 蹴落(けお)とす (keotosu), which include the obsolete ren'yōkei 蹴(け) (ke) (modern 蹴(け)り (keri)).”
Source: Wiktionary: 蹴る (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.