First opened Saturday, March 7, 2009
世話
せわする
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.
looking after; to look after
世話 is believed to derive from 忙しい (sewashii, “busy”), and its kanji are ateji.
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
いらぬお世話だ。
It's none of your business.
おじいさんの世話をする。
I take care of my grandfather.
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.
- “Believed to derive from 忙しい (sewashii, “busy”). The kanji are ateji (当(あ)て字(じ)).”
Source: Wiktionary: 世話 (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
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.