First opened Saturday, August 28, 2010
行う
おこなう
- 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 carry out; to conduct (typically used in written language)
Okonau may be おこ (oko, from 起く) plus なふ (nafu), though the source calls that suffixation unusual.
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 行
In a sentence
彼女の歓迎会を行った。
We had a welcome party for her.
大統領は大赦を行った。
The president granted a general pardon.
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.
- Hedged“From classical 四(よ)段(だん)活(かつ)用(よう) (yodan katsuyō) verb 行(おこな)ふ (okonafu), possibly formed from おこ (oko, from 起(お)く (oku)) + なふ (nafu, verb-forming suffix). However, the suffix なふ (-nafu) usually attaches on nominal roots, not other verb stems, making the theorized suffixation unusual.”
Source: Wiktionary: 行う (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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.