First opened Sunday, May 29, 2005
担ぐ
かつぐ
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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 shoulder, to carry on shoulder
Katsugu is possibly a shift from katagu, or else a doublet of 被ぐ (katsugu).
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 担
In a sentence
彼は肩に銃を担いだ。
He carried a rifle on his shoulder.
男は袋を肩に担いだ。
The man threw a bag across his shoulder.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- Hedged“Possibly a shift from 担(かた)ぐ (katagu) below. Alternatively, a doublet of 被ぐ (katsugu).”
Source: Wiktionary: 担ぐ (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 担ぐ on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not かつぐ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
かたぐ
- “Verbalization of 肩(かた) (kata, “shoulder”).”
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.