First opened Thursday, May 7, 2009
遅れ
おくれ
- 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).
delay, lag
遅れ, “delay, lag”, is the continuative stem of the verb 遅れる (okureru), with examples from at least the 1300s.
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 遅
In a sentence
彼女は学校に遅れがちだ。
She tends to be late for school.
彼は１時間遅れで現れた。
He turned up an hour later.
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.
- “The 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 遅(おく)れる (okureru, “to be late; to be delayed; to come after something else”).”
- “Examples appear from at least the 1300s.”
Source: Wiktionary: 遅れ (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.