First opened Sunday, December 2, 2012
ぺこぺこ
ぺこぺこ
Pitch accent: We don't have the data for this section. No accent list gives this spelling and reading, or the two we check against disagree.
fawn, be very hungry
Pekopeko is related to the verb 凹む (hekomu, “to become hollow or dented, to collapse inwardly, to sink in”).
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
お腹がぺこぺこです。
I'm starved.
上役にやたらにぺこぺこするな。
Don't be subservient to your boss.
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.
- “Related to the verb 凹む (hekomu, “to become hollow or dented, to collapse inwardly, to sink in”).”
Source: Wiktionary: ぺこぺこ (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.