First opened Monday, May 18, 2009
動く
うごく
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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 move
“To move” may start from the sound of something wriggling.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
Written with 動
In a sentence
動かないで！
Hold it!
心が動くね。
That sounds very tempting.
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.
- “From Old Japanese. Attested in the Kojiki of 712. From Proto-Japonic *unkoku.”
- Hedged“Likely derived as a compound of うご (ugo, a 擬態語 (gitaigo, “mimetic word”) imitative of something crawling or creeping; compare the sound shapes of roots wrig- or wig- in English wriggle, wiggle) + く (ku, verb-forming suffix). Compare also the related adverb うごうご (ugougo, “wrigglingly, squirmingly, creepingly: moving in continuous small increments”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 動く (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).
Other readings of 動く on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not うごく. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
いごく
- “Rare dialectal variation on ugoku above.”
- “Attested from the late Muromachi period (1336–1573).”
おごく
- “Rare dialectal variation on ugoku above.”
- “Attested in a text from 1002.”
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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.