First opened Sunday, April 1, 2007
吠える
ほえる
- 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 bark, to howl
Hoeru is from Proto-Japonic *pəyu, and cognate with Kunigami buirun.
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 吠
In a sentence
犬が吠えている。
A dog is barking.
私を見て、吠えた。
He looked at me and barked.
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.
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *pəyu. Cognate with Kunigami 吠いるん (ぶいるん, buirun), Miyako 吠いㇲ゙ (ぶいㇲ゙, buiz).”
Source: Wiktionary: 吠える (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.