First opened Tuesday, September 27, 2005
掻く
かく
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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 scratch
Kaku, “to scratch”, is cognate with 書く (kaku, “to write”).
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 掻
In a sentence
大汗をかいた。
They sweated gallons.
彼は赤っ恥をかいた。
He covered himself with shame.
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.
- “From Old Japanese, ultimately from Proto-Japonic *kak- (“to scratch”).”
- “First attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE.”
- “Cognate with 書く (kaku, “to write”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 掻く (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).
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.