First opened Tuesday, September 22, 2009
用いる
もちいる
- 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 use, to make use of
“To use” is “hold” plus “bring along”.
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 用
In a sentence
ナイフとして用いられている。
It can be used as a knife.
この語は今では用いられない。
That word has fallen out of use.
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 持ち (mochi, the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of verb 持つ (motsu), “to have, hold”) + 率る (iru, “to bring along”).”
- “Also historically spelled 用ひる (mochihiru) in some texts since before the Edo period (see that entry for further detail).”
Source: Wiktionary: 用いる (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.