First opened Thursday, September 16, 2010
聞こえる
きこえる
- 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 be heard, to be audible
Kikoeru is from 聞こゆ (kikoyu), built on kika, the irrealis of 聞く (kiku, “to hear”), plus ゆ (-yu).
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 聞
In a sentence
聞こえますか。
Do you read me?
聞こえないよ。
I can't hear it.
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.
- “⟨ki₁ka yu⟩ → ⟨ki₁ko₂yu⟩ → */kʲikəju/ → /kikoju/ → /kikojeru/ → /kikoeru/”
- “From Old Japanese verb 聞こゆ (kikoyu), itself derived from the 未然形 (mizenkei, “irrealis form”) of 聞く (kiku, “to hear, listen”) kika + ゆ (-yu, attributive suffix).”
- “Development”
- “Natural progression from Old and Classical Japanese 下(しも)二(に)段(だん)活(かつ)用(よう) (shimo nidan katsuyō, “lower bigrade conjugation”) verbs ending in -u to modern Japanese 下(しも)一(いち)段(だん)活(かつ)用(よう) (shimo ichidan katsuyō, “lower monograde conjugation”) verbs ending in -eru.”
Source: Wiktionary: 聞こえる (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).
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.