First opened Friday, December 7, 2012
召す
めす
- 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 call, to send for, to put on
Mesu, “to call”, is cognate with 見す (mesu, “(honorific) to see; to govern”).
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 召
In a sentence
お祖父さまはお風邪を召していらっしゃいます。
Grandfather has caught a cold.
あのお年を召した人に席を譲ってあげてはどうですか。
Why don't you give your seat to that old gentleman?
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.
- “Cognate with 見(め)す (mesu, “(honorific) to see; to govern”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 召す (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.