First opened Wednesday, August 5, 2009
繰り返す
くりかえす
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
- 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).
to repeat, to do something over again
To repeat is to “reel” and “return”.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
歴史は繰り返す。
History repeats itself.
彼は質問を繰り返しました。
He repeated his question.
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.
- “繰り (kuri, 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 繰る (kuru, “to reel, to wind, to spin”)) + 返す (kaesu, “to return”)”
Source: Wiktionary: 繰り返す (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.