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First opened Friday, February 11, 2011

会う

あう

  • 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 meet, to see

JLPT N5CommonGodan verb with 'u' endingintransitive verb和語 · Native JapaneseSound changeOrigin unclear

Au has no settled origin: one theory has it imitating the sound of the upper and lower lips meeting.

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 会

In a sentence

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“Inherited from Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *ap-. Further etymology uncertain. Theories of earliest origin include:”
  • “* Imitative of the upper and lower lips meeting”
  • “* Shortened from 二肖経 (フタアエフ futa aefu, two go-together)”
  • “* Shortened from アアフツ (aa futsu), the latter portion a variant of 二(ふた)つ (futatsu, “two”)”
  • “* Either 間(あい) (ai, “relation”) → 逢(あふ) (afu, “meeting”) → 会(あう) (au) or 逢(あふ) (afu) → 間(あい) (ai) → 会(あう) (au)”
  • “Various forms of あう (合, 会, 逢, 遭; “join; be together; meet”) are attested from the Middle Ages (c. 1185-1573). Compare 合(あ)う (au).”

Source: Wiktionary: 会う (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.
Sound change
The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
Origin unclear
Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.

Also read あう

Other words so far with exactly this reading and another spelling, oldest first, with the pitch accent each entry shows: where they differ, the pitch tells the words apart in speech. Only the readings are compared; nothing is claimed about how the words are related.

  • 会うThis word

    to meet, to see

    あ↓う head-high (atamadaka)

  • 合う

    to fit, to match

    あ↓う head-high (atamadaka)

  • 遭う

    to meet, to encounter (undesirable nuance)

    あ↓う head-high (atamadaka)

More like this

Other words so far that share a part, a process or a layer with this one, closest first. Each tag says what is shared; nothing here is a claim beyond what the entries already show.

Also opened on February 11

The words that opened on this day of the year in other years, oldest first. They share only the date: nothing else links them.

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Origins quoted from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Kaikki.org; meanings & kanji from JMdict, KANJIDIC2 & KRADFILE (EDRDG, CC BY-SA 4.0) — how we check it