First opened Monday, August 20, 2007
奥
おく
- 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).
interior, inner part
Oku is rooted in Old Japanese despite overlapping with a goon reading from Middle Chinese, and is cognate with 沖 (oki, “the open sea, offshore”).
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 奥
In a sentence
彼は建物の奥に行ってみました。
He went to the back of the building.
彼は店の奥の暗い隅に姿を消した。
He disappeared into a dark corner at the back of the shop.
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“Despite the apparent overlap with the modern goon reading of oku that is derived from Middle Chinese, this term is actually rooted in Old Japanese, appearing in the Man'yōshū collection of poetry dating to roughly 759 CE. Cognate with 沖 (oki, “the open sea, offshore”), originally in reference to “somewhere far removed, possibly out of sight”. While oki came to mean “far removed in the wide open → far off shore”, oku instead came to mean “far removed inside → inside, interior”.”
Source: Wiktionary: 奥 (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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.