First opened Thursday, November 18, 2010
余り
あまり
- flat (heiban)
The two sources behind the pitch accent disagree about this word, so an accent is shown only where they give the same one.
- Kanjium: falls after mora 1 (head-high (atamadaka)); flat (heiban)
- UniDic: flat (heiban); falls after mora 3 (tail-high (odaka))
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).
not very; surplus
Amari is the stem form of the verb 余る (amaru), appearing in the Kojiki of 712 CE.
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 余
In a sentence
あまり人に頼るな。
Don't depend on other people too much.
あまり希望がない。
There is not much hope.
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 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) of verb 余る (amaru, “to be left over, to be in excess”). Appears in the Kojiki of 712 CE.”
- “Also encountered with geminate reading あんまり (anmari) as an emphatic form for the adjective and adverb uses. This form appears in the 1400s.”
Source: Wiktionary: 余り (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.