First opened Monday, October 22, 2012
衰える
おとろえる
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 4
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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 become weak, to decline
Otoroeru is from Classical Japanese 衰ふ (otorofu), 劣ろ (otoro, the irrealis of 劣る (otoru, “to be inferior to”)) plus ふ (-fu).
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 衰
In a sentence
風がやや衰えた。
The wind abated a little.
彼は健康が衰えた。
He declined in health.
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 Classical Japanese 衰(おとろ)ふ (otorofu), itself a combination of 劣(おと)ろ (otoro, the 未然形(みぜんけい) (mizenkei, “irrealis form”) of 劣(おと)る (otoru, “to be inferior to”)) + ふ (-fu, an auxiliary verb expressing repetition or ongoing state)”
- “.”
- “Development”
- “Natural progression from Old and Classical Japanese 下(しも)二(に)段(だん)活(かつ)用(よう) (shimo nidan katsuyō, “lower bigrade conjugation”) verbs ending in -u to modern Japanese 下(しも)一(いち)段(だん)活(かつ)用(よう) (shimo ichidan katsuyō, “lower monograde conjugation”) verbs ending in -eru. For the Old / Classical form, see the 衰ふ entry.”
Source: Wiktionary: 衰える (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.