First opened Tuesday, January 9, 2007
這う
はう
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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 creep, to crawl
Hau is written with 這, a kokkun not derived from the Chinese kanbun tradition.
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 這
In a sentence
赤ん坊は歩く前にはう。
Babies crawl before they walk.
赤ん坊は四つんばいではった。
The baby crawled on hands and knees.
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“The usage of the character 這 is considered to be a 国訓 (kokkun) not derived from Chinese 漢文 (kanbun) tradition. Alongside China's usage of the character 這 /这 for a medieval pronoun, also of murky origins, this makes 這 a character with markedly different usages in both countries/languages. It is possibly a corrupt form of 𧥡, which is an ancient form of 誕 (MC danX) and borrowed as 蜒 (MC yen).”
Source: Wiktionary: 這う (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.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.