First opened Monday, January 28, 2008
追う
おう
- flat (heiban)
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 chase, to run after
Ou is perhaps cognate with 負う (ou, “to carry on the back”), as both involve one person moving behind another, though the accents do not match.
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 追
In a sentence
流行を追うな。
Don't follow fashion.
あの車を追ってくれ。
Follow that car.
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, from Proto-Japonic *op- ~ əp-. Perhaps cognate with 負う (ou, “to carry on the back”), as both words involve the movement of one person behind another person, but the accent values in Early Middle Japanese and Kyoto do not match.”
Source: Wiktionary: 追う (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.