First opened Saturday, February 18, 2006
役
やく
- tail-high (odaka): 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).
role, position
Yaku is from Middle Chinese 役, the goon reading, so likely the initial borrowing.
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 役
In a sentence
重要な役を演じる。
I play an important part.
何の役にも立たない。
It is good for nothing.
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“From Middle Chinese 役 (MC ywek). The goon reading, so likely the initial borrowing.”
Source: Wiktionary: 役 (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).
Other readings of 役 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not やく. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
えき
- “From Middle Chinese 役 (MC ywek).”
- “The kan'on pronunciation, so likely a later borrowing.”
What the labels mean
- 漢語 Sino-Japanese
- Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.