First opened Friday, September 14, 2012
尊ぶ
とうとぶ
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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 value, to prize, to esteem
Tōtobu is 尊 (tōto, the stem of 尊い (tōtoi, “noble, exalted, sacred”)) plus ぶ (-bu, “to act like”).
Taken apart
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Written with 尊
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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.
- “尊 (tōto, tatto, stem of 尊い (tōtoi, tattoi, “noble, exalted, sacred”)) + ぶ (-bu, “to act like”)”
- “The ぶ (-bu) suffix usually conjugated with the upper bigrade pattern (上二段活用 (kami nidan katsuyō)), and 尊ぶ conjugated this way in Old Japanese. Since the Heian period, 尊ぶ shifted to conjugate using the classical yodan pattern, the precursor to the modern godan conjugation (五段活用 (godan katsuyō)).”
Source: Wiktionary: 尊ぶ (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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.