First opened Friday, May 10, 2013
我
われ
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
me, oneself, self, ego
Ware is from Old Japanese, the long form of 我 (wa) plus れ (-re, nominalizing suffix).
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 我
In a sentence
恋人よ、我に帰れ。
Lover, come back to me.
我思う、故に我あり。
I think, therefore I am.
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, as the long form of 我 (wa) below.”
- “Compound of 我 (wa, see below) + れ (-re, nominalizing suffix).”
Source: Wiktionary: 我 (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).
Other readings of 我 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not われ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
わ・が
- “From Old Japanese 我 (wa).”
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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.