First opened Saturday, May 30, 2009
蘇る
よみがえる
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
- 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 be resurrected, to be revived
To be revived is, literally, to “return from the land of the dead”.
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 蘇
In a sentence
不思議な感じが蘇ってきた。
The strange feeling came back.
春の雨が花に生気をよみがえらせた。
A spring rain revived the flower.
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 yodan katsuyō verb yomigaheru, itself derived from 黄(よ)泉(み) (yomi, “land of the dead, underworld”) + 帰(かえ)る (kaeru, “to return”). The kaeru changes to gaeru as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
- “First attested in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE.”
Source: Wiktionary: 蘇る (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.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).