First opened Saturday, September 17, 2011
帯びる
おびる
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
- flat (heiban)
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 bear, to carry, to be entrusted
Obiru is from Old Japanese 帯ぶ (obu), which moved from the quadrigrade pattern to the upper bigrade and then to the modern upper monograde.
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 帯
In a sentence
酒気帯び運転をするな。
Don't drive under the influence of alcohol.
東の空が赤みを帯びている。
There is a tinge of red in the eastern sky.
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.
- “From Old Japanese 帯ぶ (obu), then following 四段活用 (yodan katsuyō, “quadrigrade conjugation”). Later on, it shifted to 上二段活用 (kami nidan katsuyō, “upper bigrade conjugation”), the precursor to the modern 上一段活用 (kami ichidan katsuyō, “upper monograde conjugation”).”
- “Development”
- “Natural progression from Old and Classical Japanese 上(かみ)二(に)段(だん)活(かつ)用(よう) (kami nidan katsuyō, “upper bigrade conjugation”) verbs ending in -u to modern Japanese 上(かみ)一(いち)段(だん)活(かつ)用(よう) (kami ichidan katsuyō, “upper monograde conjugation”) verbs ending in -iru.”
Source: Wiktionary: 帯びる (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.