First opened Sunday, June 28, 2009
見える
みえる
- 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 be visible; -- polite verb meaning 来る (くる) --
“To be visible” began as “see” with a suffix that means “can be”.
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 見
In a sentence
陸が見えてきた。
Land came in sight.
飛行機が見えた。
I saw a plane.
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 classical 見(み)ゆ (miyu), from 見(み)る (miru, “to see”) + ゆ (-yu, potential/passive suffix).”
- “First attested in the Kojiki of 712.”
Source: Wiktionary: 見える (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 見える on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not みえる. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
まみえる
- “Compound of 目 (ma, “eye”) + 見ゆ (miyu, “to be seen”, modern 見える).”
- “First attested in the Nihon Shoki of 720.”
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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.