ရေ
re/jè/
The Burmese word for water is ရေ (re).
The term ရေ is used for all forms of water, such as drinking water, river water or rainwater.
Meaning: inorganic compound H₂O (noun)
How does it change in a sentence?
In Burmese, ရေ is an uncountable noun and does not change its form when referring to different quantities.
How do you pronounce it?
The romanization is re. The IPA is /jè/.
Did you know?
- The word ရေ is a homonym in Burmese. Depending on the context, it can mean 'water', 'to count' or 'skin'.
- In some historical linguistic reconstructions, the word for 'water' in the Sino-Tibetan family is even linked to the Old Chinese word for 'tears'.
- Burmese uses ရေ as a root in many compound words to describe things that are liquid or fluid, even if they are not water.
Examples in context
- ထောမ် ရေထဲ ကျမိတယ်။Tom fell into the water.This sentence shows how to use ရေ when describing falling into water.Tatoeba #5163505 by Khamlan, translation #2645383 by CK
- နင် ငါ့ အတွက် ရေ တစ်ခွက် လောက် ယူခဲ့ ပေးပါ လား။Could you bring me a glass of water?This sentence is useful for requesting a glass of ရေ.Tatoeba #8274331 by sithu015, translation #8272676 by CK
- ရေ နှစ်ခွက်two cups of waterThis sentence demonstrates how to count ရေ using a classifier for cups.
- 1 more sentence on Tatoeba
Example conversation
At a small cafe during a hot afternoon.
- ခိုင်ခိုင် Khine Khineအစ်ကို အောင်အောင်၊ ရေ တစ် ခွက် ပေးလို့ ရမလား။a ko aung aung, yay tait khwat pay lo ya ma lar.Brother Aung Aung, could you give me a glass of water?
- အောင်အောင် Aung Aungရပါတယ် ခိုင်ခိုင်၊ ရေ အေး လိုချင်တာလား။ya bar tal khine khine, yay aye lo chin tar lar.Of course, Khine Khine, do you want cold water?
- ခိုင်ခိုင် Khine Khineဟုတ်တယ်၊ အေး အေး လေး ဖြစ်ရင် ကောင်းမယ်။hote tal, aye aye lay phit yin kaung mal.Yes, it would be good if it's cold.
- အောင်အောင် Aung Aungခဏလေးနော်၊ အခုပဲ ယူလာပေးမယ်။kha na lay naw, a khu pae yu lar pay mal.Just a moment, I'll bring it right now.
Sources
- Wiktionary, “water” translations and entries ရေ, CC BY-SA 4.0, dump of 2026-09-26.
- Word origins: Wiktionary entries ရေ, CC BY-SA 4.0.
- Example sentences: Tatoeba CC BY 2.0 FR, Wiktionary CC BY-SA 4.0.
