First opened Sunday, July 16, 2006
さっき
さっき
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.
a little while ago
Sakki is a shift from 先 (saki).
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
さっき電話が鳴ってたよね？
The telephone was just ringing, wasn't it?
さっきの手は大失敗だった。
That move was a big mistake.
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.
- “Shift from 先 (saki).”
Source: Wiktionary: さっき (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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.