First opened Friday, February 10, 2006
食べる
たべる
- 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 eat
“To eat” began as the humble “to receive” 食ぶ (tabu), the humble form of 賜ぶ (tabu, “to (deign to) give”).
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 食
In a sentence
何か食べたい？
Do you feel like eating?
羊は草を食べる。
Sheep feed on grass.
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.
- “From earlier Old Japanese form 食(た)ぶ (tabu, “to (humbly) receive or get”, from a superior), a verb with the 下二段(しもにだん) (shimo nidan, “lower bigrade”) conjugation pattern. This was the humble form of 賜(た)ぶ, 給(た)ぶ (tabu, “to (deign to) give”, to an inferior), a verb with the full 四段(よだん) (yodan, “quadrigrade”) conjugation pattern.”
- “Development”
- “Natural progression from Old and Classical Japanese 下(しも)二(に)段(だん)活(かつ)用(よう) (shimo nidan katsuyō, “lower bigrade conjugation”) verbs ending in -u to modern Japanese 下(しも)一(いち)段(だん)活(かつ)用(よう) (shimo ichidan katsuyō, “lower monograde conjugation”) verbs ending in -eru.”
- Hedged“Most likely related to 給(たま)う (tamau, “to give”, as a superior gives a thing to, or does something for, an inferior).”
- “Compare the historical development of meaning from “to humbly receive” → “to eat”, with the modern use of the humble verb 頂(いただ)く (itadaku, “to receive”) just before eating, in a sense of “I humbly receive this food.””
Source: Wiktionary: 食べる (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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.