First opened Saturday, July 21, 2012
俺
おれ
- 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).
I (ego) (boastful first-person pronoun)
Ore was originally a second person pronoun, as used in the Kojiki of 712 CE, and gradually became a first person pronoun.
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 俺
In a sentence
俺は人間だ。
I am a man.
俺に任せろ。
Let me handle this.
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“From Old Japanese. Originally a second person pronoun, as used in the Kojiki of 712 CE. Thought to have gradually changed into a first person pronoun from roughly the Kamakura and Muromachi periods. Some scholars, however, point out the lack of precedent of a second-person pronoun shifting to a first-person pronoun as an etymological discontinuity; they instead explain the first-person usage as an early corruption of 己 (onore, “I, me”), with the ancient second-person usage perhaps deriving of a different root.”
Source: Wiktionary: 俺 (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.