First opened Tuesday, May 26, 2009
守る
まもる
- 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 protect; to abide (by the rules)
To protect is to “watch over”, and its first syllable is an old word for “eye”.
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 守
In a sentence
秘密を守れる？
Can you keep a secret?
左側通行を守れ。
Keep to the left.
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 目(ま) (ma-, “eye, sight”, archaic) + 守(も)る (moru, “protect, watch over”, Etymology 2). まぼる and まぶる are alterations of まもる.”
Source: Wiktionary: 守る (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).
Other readings of 守る on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not まもる. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
もる
- “From Old Japanese. Related to 目 (me, “eye”) and 見る (miru, “to see, to look at”), with an underlying meaning of to watch over.”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.