First opened Friday, November 6, 2009
流石
さすが
- flat (heiban)
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).
indeed, truly, as one would expect
さすが is “sasuga ni” with its last syllable dropped, and the reason for its kanji is still an open question.
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
さすが、彼は期待を裏切らないね。
That's just what one would expect of him.
彼はさすが大学に行っただけのことはある。
He did not go to college 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.
- “From さすがに (sasuga ni) with omission of the final に (ni). The standalone term without the final に (ni) is first cited to the late 800s.”
- “The kanji are jukujikun (熟(じゅく)字(じ)訓(くん)).”
Source: Wiktionary: 流石 (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.