First opened Thursday, September 29, 2011
強いる
しいる
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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 force, to compel, to coerce
Shiiru is from Old Japanese 強ふ (sipu), an upper bigrade verb, and is related to 誣いる (shiiru, “to slander; to defame”).
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 強
In a sentence
彼らは我々に服従を強いた。
They enforced obedience upon us.
守備隊は降伏を強いられた。
The garrison was forced to surrender.
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.
- “⟨sipu⟩ → ⟨sipuru⟩ → /ɕiɸuɾu/ → /ɕiɸɨɾu/ → /ɕiwiɾu/ → /ɕiiɾu/”
- “From Old Japanese 強ふ (sipu), in the 上(かみ)二(に)段(だん)活(かつ)用(よう) (kami nidan katsuyō, “upper bigrade conjugation”) pattern.”
- “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.”
- Hedged“Related to 誣(し)いる (shiiru, “to slander; to defame”). Possibly related to 癈いる (shiiru, “to lose function (said of body organs)”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 強いる (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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.