First opened Wednesday, July 16, 2008
終える
おえる
- 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 finish
終える traces a long sound path from Old Japanese wopu, through /wofuru/ and /oheru/, to /oeru/.
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 終
In a sentence
彼は仕事を終えた。
He got through with his work.
私は宿題を終えた。
I've finished my homework.
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.
- “/wopu/ → (attributive) /wopuru/ → /wofuru/ → (grammatical shift) /woferu/ → /oheru/ → /oeru/”
- “From Old Japanese verb wopu, from Proto-Japonic *wopu.”
- “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 root verb was ambitransitive, with both transitive and intransitive senses conjugated using the 下二段活用 (shimo nidan katsuyō, “lower bigrade conjugation”) pattern. Over time, the two senses differentiated as the intransitive evolved into modern 終わる (owaru, also derivable as the spontaneous or passive -aru ending from a putative but unrecorded 四段活用 (yodan katsuyō), the full quadrigrade conjugation pattern), while the transitive evolved into modern 終える (oeru, with the 下一段活用 (shimo ichidan katsuyō, “lower monograde conjugation”) pattern, also known as "type 2", and the expected historical development for shimo nidan verbs).”
- Hedged“Probably not related to superficially similar 追う (ou, ancient opu, “to follow”, quadrigrade conjugation in older Japanese), considering the distinct lack of initial /w/ in ancient spellings.”
Source: Wiktionary: 終える (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.