First opened Wednesday, August 19, 2009
行方
ゆくえ
- 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).
one's whereabouts
Whereabouts is “the direction one goes” — and its last syllable is a worn-down he.
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.
In a sentence
杳として行方が知れない。
Nothing whatever is known of him.
彼の行方は誰にもわからない。
God knows where he has gone.
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.
- “⟨yukupe₁⟩ → */jukupʲe/ → /jukuɸe/ → /jukuwe/ → /jukue/”
- “From Old Japanese.”
- “From verb 行く (yuku, “to go”) + 辺 (-he, “direction, location”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 行方 (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 行方 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ゆくえ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
なめがた
- “Also spelled Namekata (without rendaku) in older texts.”
いくかた・ぎょうほう・なみかた・ひじかた・ゆきかた・ゆきがた・ゆくがた
- “Other various nanori readings.”
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.