First opened Sunday, September 5, 2010
飛ぶ
とぶ
- 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 fly, to hop
Tobu is first attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE, from Proto-Japonic *tənpu.
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 飛
In a sentence
飛ぶ前に見よ。
Look before you leap.
飛ぶ魚もいる。
Some fish fly.
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 attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE. From Proto-Japonic *tənpu. Cognate with Okinawan 飛ぶん (tubun).”
Source: Wiktionary: 飛ぶ (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.