聞く

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 聞

In a sentence

• 世論(せろん)に聞(き)け。

  Heed public opinion.

  Tatoeba #78929, translation #324787

• 聞(き)いてるの？

  Do you hear me?

  Tatoeba #83638, translation #319989

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. First appears in the Kojiki of 712 CE in its 未然形 (mizenkei, “irrealis form”), spelled in phonetic man'yōgana as 岐加受 (kikazu). Ultimately from Proto-Japonic *kiku.”
• “Cognates”
• “In the Ryukyuan branch of Japonic, cognate with Kikai 聞きゅい (kikyui), Kunigami 聞ちゅん (hichun, shichun), Miyako 聞きぃ (ksïksï), Northern Amami Ōshima 聞きゅり (kikyuri), Okinawan 聞ちゅん (chichun), Okinoerabu 聞きゅん (kikyun), Southern Amami Ōshima 聞きゅむっ (xikyum), Tokunoshima 聞き (kiki), Yaeyama 聞くん (sïkun), Yonaguni 聞ん (kkun), and Yoron 聞きゅん (kikyun).”
• “False cognate of Malayalam കേൾക്കുക (kēḷkkuka).”

Source: Wiktionary: 聞く (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.