First opened Friday, October 7, 2005
遡る
さかのぼる
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 4
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 go back, to date back; ascend
“To go back” is likely 逆 (saka, “reverse”) plus 上る (noboru, “ascend, go up”).
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 遡
In a sentence
彼の家系は１７世紀にさかのぼる。
His family dates back to the seventeenth century.
その話は１６世紀までさかのぼる。
The story goes back to the sixteenth century.
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 from Old Japanese, compound of 逆(さか) (saka, “reverse”) + 上(のぼ)る (noboru, “ascend, go up”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 遡る (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.