First opened Monday, May 23, 2011
粥
かゆ
- 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).
rice porridge
Kayu is first attested in the Shoku Nihongi, dated 700, and its derivation beyond that is uncertain.
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 粥
In a sentence
若いときは貧乏でかゆをすすって暮らした。
When he was young, he was so poor that he virtually had to live on gruel.
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.
- “From Old Japanese. First attested in a portion of the Shoku Nihongi dated to 700.”
- Hedged“Further derivation uncertain. Some theories include:”
- “* Possible shift from 食湯 (keyu, literally “food + hot water”) or 濃湯 (koyu, literally “thick, rich + hot water”).”
- “** However, neither of these suggested compounds are attested.”
- “* Possible combination of 加 (ka, “to add; additional”) + 湯 (yu, “hot water”).”
- “** However, the ka reading for 加 is from Middle Chinese, and any mixed Middle Chinese-Old Japanese compound would be extremely unlikely as early as this term is attested.”
- Hedged“* An alternate theory suggests it is an abbreviation of 炊ぎ湯 (kashigiyu).”
- Hedged“** Semantically, this would seem to make the most sense, as the verb 炊ぐ (kashigu) refers specifically to the cooking of grains to make them edible.”
- “*: However, a review of other sound shifts and abbreviation patterns shows that any change from kashigiyu to kayu is phonologically unlikely.”
- “*: Another issue is that the verb 炊ぐ (kashigu) initially referred to the steaming of rice, which could not have resulted in any kind of kayu or rice porridge. Only later did the practices of cooking rice shift to instead boil rice in water, a necessary step in the making of kayu.”
Source: Wiktionary: 粥 (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).
Other readings of 粥 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not かゆ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
かい
- “/kaju/ → /kai/”
- “Sound shift from kayu. First attested in 1563.”
- “Appears to be archaic. Not listed in references focused on modern pronunciation details.”
しゅく
- “Ultimately from Middle Chinese 粥 (MC tsyuwk). First attested as a standalone noun in Japanese in 1775.”
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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Clipping
- A longer word or phrase shortened in everyday use.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.