First opened Saturday, December 10, 2005
囁く
ささやく
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
- 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 whisper, to murmur
Sasayaku is ささ (sasa, an onomatopoeia) plus the verb-forming suffix やく (-yaku).
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 囁
In a sentence
彼は彼女に何か囁いた。
He whispered something to her.
彼は私に何かささやいた。
He whispered something to me.
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.
- “ささ (sasa, an onomatopoeia) + やく (-yaku, a verb-forming suffix attaching to mimetic words)”
Source: Wiktionary: 囁く (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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.