First opened Saturday, July 16, 2011
おどおど
おどおど
- 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).
coweringly, hesitantly
Odoodo shifted from earlier おづおづ (ozuozu), a reduplication of Old Japanese 怖づ (“to be intimidated, to hesitate”).
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.
In a sentence
おどおどして首をたれた。
He hung his head sheepishly.
彼女の前に出るときまっておどおどする。
I always get nervous in her presence.
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.
- “Shift from earlier おづおづ (ozuozu), from reduplication of Old Japanese 怖づ (“to be intimidated, to hesitate”) — the Modern Japanese 怖じる.”
Source: Wiktionary: おどおど (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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.