First opened Sunday, September 12, 2010
売る
うる
- 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 sell (v.t.)
Uru is Old Japanese, and possibly cognate with 得る (eru, “to obtain”), from getting money for the item sold.
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 売
In a sentence
私は本を売った。
I sold a book.
僕は本を安く売った。
I sold my books cheaply.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “From Old Japanese. Attested in 正倉院文書 (Shōsōin Monjo, “Shōsōin Documents”) with the spelling 宇利 (⟨uri⟩) (Omodaka 1967, p. 136). In turn, from Proto-Japonic *ur-.”
- Hedged“Possibly cognate with Old Japanese 得 (u), modern Japanese 得る (eru, “to obtain, to get”), from the sense of getting money in exchange for the item sold.”
Source: Wiktionary: 売る (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.