First opened Saturday, January 7, 2006
避ける
さける
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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 avoid (physical contact); to ward off, to avert
Sakeru is from 避く (saku), cognate with 裂ける (sakeru).
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 避
In a sentence
ジムは怒りを抑えて争いをさけることができた。
Jim was able to hold back his anger and avoid a fight.
彼はあまりにも性格が攻撃的で、人に避けられている。
He is so aggressive that others avoid him.
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.
- “From 避(さ)く (saku), cognate with Japanese 裂ける (sakeru). See the page for 避(さ)く (saku) for more information.”
Source: Wiktionary: 避ける (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.