First opened Monday, June 15, 2009
物語る
ものがたる
- 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 tell, to indicate
To tell is to “narrate a thing” — with かたる voiced to がたる.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
統計はすべてを物語るとは限らない。
Statistics don't always tell the whole story.
彼女の顔がその大きな失望を物語っていた。
Her face expressed her bitter disappointment.
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.
- “物(もの) (mono, “thing”) + 語(かた)る (kataru, “to tell, narrate”).”
- “The kataru changes to gataru as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
Source: Wiktionary: 物語る (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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).