First opened Friday, March 27, 2009
焚く
たく
- 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 burn, to kindle, to build a fire
焚く is speculatively linked to Korean 타다 (tada), but the source says that poses issues.
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 焚
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.
- Hedged“From Old Japanese. Appears since at least the Man'yōshū (759). Speculatively associated with Korean 타다 (tada), but this poses issues.”
- “(to cook on a fire): The sense initially described cooking rice grains, which were also used by 煮る (niru) and 炊ぐ (kashigu); by Early Modern Japanese it was used to describe cooking/boiling food in general. Such usage of cooking both rice and vegetables is most notable in the Kansai dialects, while the Tohoku dialects continue to use 煮る (niru) for cooking both rice and vegetables.”
Source: Wiktionary: 焚く (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.