First opened Wednesday, October 4, 2006
博士
はかせ
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
doctorate, PhD., doctor
Hakase is ultimately from Middle Chinese 博士, an official title in the ritsuryō system, likely borrowed in the Old Japanese period.
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.
- Hedged“Ultimately from Middle Chinese 博士 (pak dzri^X). Unattested in extant Old Japanese texts, but likely borrowed in the Old Japanese period, being an official title in the ritsuryō system.”
Source: Wiktionary: 博士 (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 博士 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not はかせ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
はくし
- “From Middle Chinese 博士 (pak dzri^X)”
What the labels mean
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.