First opened Saturday, January 29, 2011
覚える
おぼえる
- 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 learn, to commit to memory, to remember, to memorize
Oboeru comes ultimately from 思う (omou, “to think”), by a nine-step sound path starting at omopu.
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 覚
In a sentence
覚えてろよ。
I will get even with you some day.
彼は詩を覚えていた。
He was learning a poem.
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.
- “/omo₂pu/ → /omwopoju/ → /omwoɸoju/ → /omoɸoju/ → /oboɸoju/ → /oboju/ → /obojuru/ → /obojeru/ → /oboeru/”
- “Ultimately from Old Japanese verb 思(おも)ふ (omopu, modern 思(おも)う (omou, “to think (about or of something)”)). The historical derivation is roughly as follows:”
- “* the 未(み)然(ぜん)形(けい) (mizenkei, “irrealis form”) omopa of Old Japanese verb 思(おも)ふ (omopu, “to think”, modern 思(おも)う (omou)) + ゆ (-yu, Old Japanese verb suffix denoting intransitive, spontaneous, or passive action):”
- “: omopayu → omopoyu”
- “: The 思ほゆ (omopoyu) form is found in the Nihon Shoki and the Man'yōshū.”
- “* contraction and regular sound changes:”
- “: omopoyu → omofoyu → obowoyu → oboyu”
- “: This change is already evident by the early Heian period.”
- “* regular historical grammatical shifts occurring for classical 下(しも)二(に)段(だん)活(かつ)用(よう) (shimo nidan katsuyō, “lower bigrade conjugation”) verbs:”
- “: oboyu → oboyuru → oboyeru → oboeru”
- “: This set of shifts occurred during the Kamakura and Muromachi periods.”
- “The verb was originally used in intransitive and passive contexts, in accordance with its derivation. It began to be used in more active and transitive contexts starting from roughly the mid-Heian period, with the learn and memorize senses appearing in the Kamakura period.”
Source: Wiktionary: 覚える (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.