First opened Tuesday, November 25, 2008
続々
ぞくぞく
- flat (heiban)
- 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).
successively, one after another
続々 doubles 続 (zoku), itself from Middle Chinese 續.
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 続
In a sentence
劇場から続々と人が出てきた。
A stream of people came out of the theater.
今私の家の付近に住宅が続々建っている。
In my neighborhood, houses are now being built one after another.
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.
- “Reduplication of 続(ぞく) (zoku, “continuing”), itself from Middle Chinese 續 (MC zjowk).”
Source: Wiktionary: 続々 (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
- 漢語 Sino-Japanese
- Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.