First opened Saturday, April 23, 2011
ぼろ
ぼろ
Pitch accent: We don't have the data for this section. No accent list gives this spelling and reading, or the two we check against disagree.
rag, tattered clothes
Boro is described as shortened from ぼろぼろ (boroboro), first attested in 1736, though a homophone for beggar monks, 梵論, dates from the early 1300s.
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.
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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.
- “Japanese sources describe this as a derivation via shortening from adjective and adverb ぼろぼろ (boroboro, “dilapidated, crumbling; dilapidatedly, crumblingly”), and give a first attestation of 1736.”
- Hedged“However, there is a homophone spelled in kanji as 梵論 or 暮露, referring to poor mendicant beggar monks, first attested variously as boro or boron starting from the early 1300s, known also as 梵論字 (boronji) and reduplicated 梵論梵論 (boroboro). This type of monk evolved into the modern 虚無僧 (komusō, “monk of emptiness”) practice, while their older name may have given rise to the cluster of related terms with meanings surrounding senses of "dilapidated, worn-out, crumbling".”
- Hedged“May be ultimately related to, or otherwise influenced by, verbs 滅びる (horobiru, “to fall to ruin, to crumble, to be destroyed”), 滅ぼす (horobosu, “to ruin, to make something crumble, to destroy”).”
Source: Wiktionary: ぼろ (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.
- Clipping
- A longer word or phrase shortened in everyday use.