First opened Wednesday, September 8, 2010
泳ぐ
およぐ
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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 swim
Oyogu was possibly oyoku, but Ryūkyūan cognates support a voiced g at the end.
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 泳
In a sentence
彼は泳げる。
He can swim.
泳げますか。
Can you swim?
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“Likely from Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *oyonku. Included in The Tale of Genji from the late 900s or early 1000s. Listed in sources with a note that this may have been pronounced originally as oyoku, however, cognates among the Ryūkyūan languages would seem to support a voiced /ɡ/ as the final consonant. Compare Kunigami 泳じゅん (uijun), Okinawan 泳じゅん (qwiijun).”
Source: Wiktionary: 泳ぐ (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.