First opened Thursday, April 10, 2008
しゃべる
しゃべる
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.
to talk, to chat, to chatter (same as 話す (はなす))
Shaberu has no known origin, but is listed in the Nippo Jisho of 1603, with an earliest appearance possibly in the early 1300s.
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“Unknown.”
- “Possible analyses include:”
- Hedged“* Related to しゃぶしゃぶ (shabushabu), itself apparently an onomatopoeia.”
- “* Derived as intensifying prefix しゃ (sha) attaching to a root form related to べりべり (beriberi, “talkatively; a talkative person”), べらべら (berabera, “bubblingly; talkatively”), べろ (bero, “tongue”).”
- Hedged“Listed in the Nippo Jisho of 1603. Earliest appearance may be in the early 1300s during the Kamakura period.”
Source: Wiktionary: しゃべる (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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.