First opened Friday, January 16, 2009
酔う
よう
- 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).
to get drunk
酔う took a long road: from Old Japanese wepu to jou, by way of classical 酔ふ.
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 酔
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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.
- “/wepu/ → /wefu/ → /jefu/ → */jewu/ → */jowu/ → /jou/”
- Hedged“Shift from classical verb 酔ふ (efu → eu), possibly parsed as jefu, itself from Old Japanese 酔ふ (wepu → wefu → eu).”
- “Compare the development of 葉 (efu → yō, “leaf”, on-yomi or Chinese-derived reading).”
Source: Wiktionary: 酔う (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).
Other readings of 酔う on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not よう. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
えう
- “Regular development of wepu. In the colloquial language, wepu developed into you, so eu is now only used in reading ancient texts.”
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.