First opened Tuesday, August 8, 2006
咥える
くわえる
- flat (heiban)
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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 hold something in the mouth
Kuwaeru is from Classical Japanese 咥ふ (kufafu), possibly related to 食う (kuu, “to eat; to grab with one's mouth”).
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 咥
In a sentence
彼はパイプをくわえて話した。
He spoke with a pipe in his mouth.
その犬は肉を一切れくわえていた。
The dog had a piece of meat in its mouth.
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“From Classical Japanese 咥(くは)ふ (kufafu). Possibly related to 食(く)う (kuu, “to eat; to grab with one's mouth”, historical form 食(く)ふ (kufu)), with auxilliary verb ふ (-fu), expressing repetition or ongoing state.”
Source: Wiktionary: 咥える (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.