First opened Monday, March 6, 2006
覆う
おおう
- flat (heiban)
- 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 cover, to hide, to conceal
Ōu is the Old Japanese verb 覆ふ (opu, “cover from above”) plus ふ (-fu), which expresses repetition or ongoing state.
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 覆
In a sentence
町は雪で覆われていた。
The city was blanketed with snow.
空は雲で覆われている。
The sky is covered with clouds.
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.
- “/opu pu/ → /opopu/ → /ofofu/ → */owou/ → /oːu/”
- “From the Old Japanese verb 覆(お)ふ (opu, “cover from above”) + ふ (-fu, auxiliary verb modifier, expressing repetition or ongoing state).”
Source: Wiktionary: 覆う (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.