First opened Sunday, November 23, 2025
滅ぼす
ほろぼす
- 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 destroy, to overthrow, to ruin
Taken apart
We don't have the data for this section. Wiktionary has no Etymology section for this reading, and a split made without one would be a guess.
Written with 滅
In a sentence
彼は酒で身を滅ぼした。
Drinking was his ruin.
核兵器はわが地球を滅ぼすと思う。
We think nuclear weapons will destroy our earth.
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
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Wiktionary dump has no Etymology section for this reading, so nothing is said about where the word comes from.
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.