First opened Thursday, May 9, 2013
膨れる
ふくれる
- 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 swell (out), to be inflated, to bulge
Fukureru is from Old Japanese 膨る (pukuru), and the source compares 袋 (fukuro, “bag”), from the way a bag is filled with items.
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 膨
In a sentence
たくさん食べたので腹が膨れた。
I've had enough, so my stomach is full.
彼女はそれで遊ぶことを拒んで、ただ座ってふくれていたのです。
She refused to play with it, and just sat there looking angry.
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 膨る (pukuru), following 下二段活用 (shimo nidan katsuyō, “lower bigrade conjugation”), from Proto-Japonic *pukoru.”
- “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.”
- “Compare 膨らむ (fukuramu, “to swell, to get bigger”), 膨らます (fukuramasu, “to make swell, to fill up”), and 袋 (fukuro, “bag”), from the way a bag is filled with items.”
- “First cited to the Man’yōshū, completed sometime after 759 CE.”
Source: Wiktionary: 膨れる (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.