First opened Friday, December 1, 2006
急ぐ
いそぐ
- 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 hurry, to be in a hurry, to rush
Isogu appears to be a root iso (“earnest? industrious?”) plus -gu, first attested as isogi in the Man'yōshū of 759.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
Written with 急
In a sentence
急がば回れ。
More haste, less speed.
急ぎなさい。
Hurry up.
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 Old Japanese. Ultimately from Proto-Japonic *isonku. Appears to be root iso ("earnest? industrious?") + verb-forming suffix -gu of uncertain meaning. Cognate with archaic adjective 勤し (isoshi, “diligent, industrious, hard-working”) and modern verb 勤しむ (isoshimu, “to work diligently, industriously”), may also be related to adverb いそいそ (isoiso, “cheerfully, unreservedly”), verb 勇む (isamu, “to be in high spirits, to be encouraged”).”
- “First attested as noun form isogi ("hurrying, rushing") in the Man'yōshū of 759.”
Source: Wiktionary: 急ぐ (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).
Other readings of 急ぐ on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not いそぐ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
またぐ
- “From Old Japanese. Further derivation unknown.”
- “First attested in a piece of 催馬楽 (saibara, “court music”) dated to the late 600s, early 700s.”
- “Homophonic verb 跨ぐ (matagu, “to straddle, to step across”) is likely a derivation of this verb, possibly from the idea of striding, i.e. walking quickly.”
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.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.