First opened Tuesday, November 2, 2010
並べる
ならべる
- 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 put (things) side by side; to line up
Naraberu is the lower monograde shift of 並ぶ (narabu), attested as early as the Man'yōshū of 759 CE.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
Written with 並
In a sentence
彼は肩をならべていた。
He was standing shoulder to shoulder.
大きさ順に本を並べた。
We arranged the books according to size.
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.
- “The regular 下一段活用 (shimo ichidan katsuyō, “lower monograde conjugation”) shift of Old Japanese and Classical Japanese verb 並ぶ (narabu, “to line up (intransitive); to line something up (transitive)”).”
- “The root verb narabu appears in Old Japanese, at least as early as the Man'yōshū of 759 CE.”
- Hedged“Probably reflecting the same nara root as verb 均す・平す (narasu, “to flatten something out, to line something up horizontally”) + ぶ (bu, suffix attaching to nouns and adjectives to indicate ongoing state or likeness). If so, probably deriving ultimately from verb 成る・為る・生る (naru, “to come into being; to become”), 慣る・馴る・狎る・熟る (naru, “to become normal, to become regular, to become fitting”, classical form of modern なれる (nareru)).”
Source: Wiktionary: 並べる (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.