First opened Monday, December 15, 2008
生まれる
うまれる
- 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 be born
生まれる is the passive form of 生む (umu, “to give birth to”), hence “to be born”.
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 生
In a sentence
彼女は昨年生まれた。
She was born last year.
彼は大阪で生まれた。
He was born in Osaka.
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.
- “From the 受身形 (ukemikei, “passive form”) of 生む (umu, “to give birth to”), hence the meaning "to be born".”
- “Also attested in its Classical Japanese form 生まる (umaru), following 下二段活用 (shimo nidan katsuyō, “lower bigrade conjugation”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 生まれる (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.