First opened Thursday, April 23, 2009
問う
とう
- 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).
to ask, to question
問う was spelled inconsistently in Old Japanese literature, as both to₁pu and to₂pu.
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 問
In a sentence
その男は窃盗犯に問われた。
The man was charged with theft.
この男は窃盗罪に問われた。
This man was charged with theft.
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.
- “⟨to_?pu⟩ → /toɸu/ → /tou/”
- “From Old Japanese. Inconsistently spelled as both to₁pu and to₂pu in Old Japanese literature.”
Source: Wiktionary: 問う (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.