First opened Sunday, June 20, 2010
行く
いく
- 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 go
Iku has a hidden twin: yuku, thanks to an old habit of inserting a y glide before vowels.
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 行
In a sentence
私は山にいく。
I go to the mountain.
日が昇っていく。
The sun is rising.
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.
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *iku. Cognate with Okinawan 行(い)ちゅん (ichun), Miyako 行きぃ (iksï).”
- “The original Proto‐Japonic root was vowel‐initial, as evidenced by the Ryukyuan cognates. In Old Japanese, a prothetic glide /j/ was often inserted before certain vowel‐initial words to ease pronunciation. This phonological innovation created the variant form 行(ゆ)く (yuku), paralleling the i‐ ~ yu‐ alternation seen in the archaic noun 夢 (ime₂) versus modern 夢(ゆめ) (yume).”
- “Because the innovative yuku form was heavily utilized in foundational classical literature, such as the Man’yōshū, it became fossilized as the high‐prestige, conservative literary standard. Meanwhile, the direct descendant iku persisted as the common spoken vernacular and was ultimately adopted as the standard for modern spoken Japanese.”
Source: Wiktionary: 行く (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.