First opened Sunday, April 5, 2009
諦める
あきらめる
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 4
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 give up, to abandon
諦める once meant “to see clearly; to understand thoroughly”, as the archaic verb 明らむ (akiramu).
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 諦
In a sentence
諦めないで。
Don't give up!
諦めてしまえ。
Give it up.
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 明(あき)らむ (akiramu), an archaic verb that originally meant “to see clearly; to understand thoroughly”. Over time, the sense shifted from “understanding something clearly” to “realizing that one’s wish cannot be fulfilled and thus giving up with acceptance”.”
Source: Wiktionary: 諦める (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.
- Meaning shift
- The word's meaning moved away from where it started.