First opened Tuesday, November 23, 2010
焼く
やく
- 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 bake, to grill
Yaku appears in the Kojiki of 712 CE, from Proto-Japonic *yak-.
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 焼
In a sentence
卵を焼いてくれ。
Fry an egg for me.
陶器は火で焼かれた。
The pottery was baked by fire.
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. Appears in the Kojiki of 712 CE, and in the Man'yōshū completed some time after 759 CE. From Proto-Japonic *yak-.”
Source: Wiktionary: 焼く (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.