First opened Wednesday, May 7, 2008
食う
くう
- 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).
(male) (vulg.) to eat
Kuu went from kupu through kuwu to kuu; the medial w vanishes but resurfaces in kuwanai and kuwareru.
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 食
In a sentence
大魚は小魚を食う。
The great fish eat the small.
蓼食う虫も好き好き。
There is no accounting for tastes.
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.
- “/kupu/ → */kuwu/ → /kuu/”
- “From Old Japanese. from Proto-Japonic *kup-.”
- “The medial /w/ vanishes because Japanese does not have a /wu/ phoneme. It surfaces though in various conjugations, such as the negative form kuwanai or the passive form kuwareru.”
- Hedged“Possibly cognate with 口(くち) (kuchi, “mouth”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 食う (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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.