First opened Sunday, November 14, 2010
来る
くる
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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 come
Kuru comes from Old Japanese 來 (ku), and the source compares する (suru), from Old Japanese す.
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 来
In a sentence
来て下さい。
Please come.
彼も来ない。
He isn't coming, either.
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.
- “From Old Japanese 來 (ku), from Proto-Japonic *ku. Compare the development of modern する (suru) from Old Japanese す.”
- “First attested in the Kojiki of 712.”
- “Cognate with Kunigami 来ん (sun), Miyako 来 (ksï), Okinawan 来ーん (chuun), Yaeyama 来ん (kïn), Yonaguni 来ん (kun).”
Source: Wiktionary: 来る (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).
Other readings of 来る on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not くる. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
きたる
- “From 来(き) (ki, continuative form of etymology 1) + 至(いた)る (itaru).”
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.