First opened Tuesday, August 24, 2010
無くなる
なくなる
- 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 disappear, to get lost
Nakunaru is 無い (nai) in -ku form plus なる (naru): literally “to become not, to become nonexistent”.
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 無
In a sentence
頭痛が無くなった。
My headache has gone.
元気がなくなった。
I lost heart.
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.
- “The adverbial -く (-ku) form of adjective 無い (nai, “not, missing, not present”) + verb なる (naru, “to become”): literally, "to become not, to become nonexistent".”
- “Cognate with 亡(な)くなる (naku naru).”
Source: Wiktionary: 無くなる (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.