First opened Monday, March 16, 2009
願う
ねがう
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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 desire, to wish, to request
願う is a compound of 祈が (nega) and the auxiliary ふ (fu), which indicates repetition or ongoing state.
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 願
In a sentence
私達は平和を願う。
We long for peace.
彼女は慈悲を願った。
She begged for mercy.
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.
- “Compound of 祈(ね)が (nega), the 未然形(みぜんけい) (mizenkei) of classical 四段活用(よだんかつよう) (yodan katsuyō) verb 祈(ね)ぐ (negu), + auxiliary verb ふ (fu, indicating repetition or ongoing state).”
Source: Wiktionary: 願う (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.