First opened Tuesday, January 1, 2013
導く
みちびく
- 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 be guided, to be shown
Michibiku is likely 道 (michi, “path”) plus 引く (hiku, “to pull; to draw”), meaning “to pull along a path”.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
Written with 導
In a sentence
彼女は老人を部屋に導いた。
She led the old man into the room.
彼は神の導きのもとで働いた。
He worked under divine guidance.
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.
- Hedged“Likely formed from 道(みち) (michi, “path”) + 引(ひ)く (hiku, “to pull; to draw”, rendaku form 引(び)く (biku)), meaning "to pull along a path" -> "to lead/guide".”
Source: Wiktionary: 導く (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.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).