First opened Monday, January 10, 2011
書く
かく
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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 write
Kaku is cognate with 掻く (“to scratch”): letters were originally scratched into wood.
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 書
In a sentence
書く紙がない。
There is no paper to write on.
手紙書いてね。
Write me sometime, OK?
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, ultimately from Proto-Japonic *kaku (“to scratch”).”
- “First attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE.”
- “Cognate with 掻く (kaku, “to scratch”) (letters were originally scratched or carved into wood in order to write); compare English write, from Proto-West Germanic *wrītan (“to scratch, carve”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 書く (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.