First opened Saturday, May 14, 2005
抱く
だく
- 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 embrace, to hug
“To embrace” lost its first syllable: idaku shifted to daku.
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 抱
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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.
- “/idaku/ → /daku/”
- “Shift from idaku.”
- “Compare the shift of 茨(いばら) (ibara, “bramble, briar”) → 薔薇(ばら) (bara, “rose”), or Classical いでる (ideru) and いだす (idasu) to modern 出(で)る (deru, “to come out, to appear”) and 出(だ)す (dasu, “to take out, to put out”).”
- “First cited to the Utsubo Monogatari of roughly 999 CE.”
Source: Wiktionary: 抱く (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 抱く on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not だく. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
いだく
- “/udaku/ → /idaku/”
- “Shift from earlier udaku.”
- “This reading is possibly cited to a work from roughly 850 CE. However, that citation is phonologically ambiguous, and may represent the reading udaku instead. The first unambiguous citation for the idaku reading is in the Tosa Nikki of roughly 935 CE.”
- “While there are numerous examples of mu shifting to u in various words, the mu- → u- → i- shift is unusual, and is shared only by mubara → ubara → ibara (茨, “bramble, briar”).”
- “Found more commonly in 和(わ)文(ぶん) (wabun, “texts written primarily in native Japanese vocabulary”).”
うだく
- “⟨mudaku⟩ → /mudaku/ → /udaku/”
- “Shift from Old Japanese 抱(むだ)く (mudaku), in turn possibly a compound of 身(む) (mu, “body”, combining reading) + 綰(た)く (taku, “to gather in the hands; to work or operate something with the hands”).”
- “First cited to a text from roughly 810 CE.”
- “This reading is encountered more in the context of 漢(かん)文(ぶん)訓(くん)読(どく) (kanbun kundoku, “the Japanese reading of texts written primarily in a variety of Classical Chinese”), and it fell out of use in roughly the Kamakura period.”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.