食べる: Full 一段 Paradigm

If the 五段 class is where Japanese conjugation makes you work, the 一段 class is where it hands you a gift. Its model verb, 食べる（たべる, to eat）, has one invariant stem — 食べ — and every single form in the language is built by dropping る and attaching an ending directly to that stem. There are no euphonic sound changes (音便）, no vowel shifts, no exceptions. Learn the eleven forms below once and you have learned the entire class, because 見る, 起きる, 寝る, 教える, and every other 一段 verb behave identically.

The whole class is "drop る, add the ending"

The name 一段 literally means "one row": the stem never leaves the え-row (or い-row) it lives on, so unlike a 五段 verb — which marches its final syllable across all five vowel rows — a 一段 verb keeps 食べ fixed and simply hangs each ending off it. Here is the complete paradigm on one screen.

The forms in real use

Notice that even the volitional 食べよう and the conditional 食べれば are just 食べ plus よう and れば — no fusion, no surprise. A learner who has drilled the 五段 sound changes will find this class almost suspiciously easy.

The three-in-one 食べられる: potential = passive = honorific

Here is the one genuinely tricky thing about the 一段 class, and the reason this page exists. The potential, the passive, and the honorific of 食べる are the exact same string: 食べられる. They are not similar — they are identical, down to the last kana. Only the surrounding context tells them apart.

In the first, 食べられない is ability; in the second, 食べられた is something done to the speaker by an に-marked agent; in the third, 食べられました shows respect to 先生. Same nine characters, three different jobs.

Disambiguating with ら抜き: 食べれる

Modern spoken Japanese has evolved a neat fix for the potential/passive collision: ら抜き言葉 ("ra-dropped words"). Speakers drop the ら from the potential, giving 食べれる（tabereru）— which can only mean "can eat," never passive or honorific. This is now extremely common in casual speech.

The catch is register. In conversation, texting, and casual writing, 食べれる is unremarkable. In essays, exams, business documents, and any formal register, it is still considered nonstandard — write 食べられる. Prescriptive teachers will mark 食べれる wrong even though half the country says it. See the ら抜き potential table for the full picture of which verbs allow it.

The imperative is 食べろ, not ×食べれ

The plain imperative of a 一段 verb ends in ろ: 食べろ, 見ろ, 起きろ. This trips up learners because the conditional stem is 食べれ（食べれば）, so people reach for ×食べれ as a command by false analogy. It does not exist as an imperative. (There is a gentler alternative imperative in 食べよ, the classical/literary 命令形, which you will meet in old texts and stiff written instructions, but the everyday spoken command is 食べろ.)

The bare 命令形 like 食べろ is genuinely harsh — it is masculine, abrupt, and used for orders, anger, sports coaching, and emergencies. In ordinary polite life you would soften it to 食べて or 食べてください rather than bark 食べろ.

Causative and causative-passive

The causative 食べさせる ("make/let eat") is stem + させる, and stacking the passive on top gives the causative-passive 食べさせられる ("be made to eat") — again with no sound changes, just suffixes clicking onto 食べ.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

• The 一段 class is "drop る, add the ending" with no sound changes ever — 食べ is a fixed stem and everything hangs off it.
• The eleven core forms are 食べる・食べます・食べない・食べた・食べて・食べられる・食べられる・食べさせる・食べよう・食べれば・食べろ.
• Potential = passive = honorific = 食べられる, all identical; only context disambiguates. Native speakers often prefer suppletive 召し上がる for the honorific.
• Casual ら抜き 食べれる means only "can eat" and resolves the ambiguity — but it is nonstandard in formal writing.
• The imperative is 食べろ, never ×食べれ; the bare command is harsh, so soften to 食べて in polite contexts.