First opened Sunday, January 9, 2011
調べる
しらべる
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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 check; to look up; to inquire; to search
Shiraberu's senses “to investigate” and “to play an instrument” are probably a semantic loan from Middle Chinese 調.
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 調
In a sentence
辞書で調べます。
I will look it up in the dictionary.
報告書をよく調べた。
I went over the report.
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.
- Hedged“The seemingly unrelated senses "to investigate" and "to play an instrument" are probably a semantic loan from Middle Chinese 調 (MC dewH) via kanbun kundoku.”
Source: Wiktionary: 調べる (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.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.