First opened Monday, December 29, 2008
分かれる
わかれる
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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 branch off, to diverge from
分かれる comes from the classical verb わかる, and is cognate with 別れる and 分ける.
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 分
In a sentence
クラスは意見が分かれた。
The class were divided in their opinion.
この本は四部に分かれている。
This book is divided into four parts.
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 classical lower bigrade verb (ラ行下二段活用) わかる (wakaru). Cognate with 別(わか)れる (wakareru) and 分(わ)ける (wakeru).”
Source: Wiktionary: 分かれる (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.