First opened Tuesday, September 20, 2005
からかう
からかう
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.
to ridicule, to make fun of
Karakau is attested in The Tale of the Heike (c. 1330); the kara may be cognate with 絡む (karamu, “to become entangled”), and the kau may be 交う (kau, “to exchange; to mix”).
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
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “Attested in The Tale of the Heike (c. 1330).”
- Hedged“The kara portion is likely cognate with 絡む (karamu, “to become entangled; start a fight with, to pick a quarrel”), 絡める (karameru, “to entangle, to entwine”), and 絡げる (karageru, “to tie together in a sheave or bunch; to hitch up the hem of a robe or skirt”); with an apparent underlying meaning of entanglement, bunch. The kau portion may be 交う (kau, “to exchange; to mix”).”
Source: Wiktionary: からかう (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.