First opened Saturday, November 7, 2009
馬鹿
ばか
- 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).
fool, idiot
“Fool” is spelled “horse + deer”, but those characters were fitted to the sound — probably an allusion to an old Chinese saying.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
彼はばかだ。
He is foolish.
彼はばか丁寧だ。
He is polite to a fault.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- Hedged“Probably originally a transcription of Sanskrit मोह (moha, “folly”), used as a cant term among monks. However, Sanskrit पाक (pāka, “naïve, foolish”) is more similar phonetically and grammatically.”
- Hedged“Alternatively, may have arisen from the same root as Old Japanese 痴 (woko, modern oko, “stupidity, ridiculousness”). However, this theory is problematic phonologically, as the /b/ ↔ /w/ shift is difficult to explain.”
- Hedged“The characters 馬鹿 (literally “horse + deer”) are ateji (当(あ)て字(じ)), probably chosen as an allusion to Literary Chinese 指鹿為馬 (“to deliberately misinterpret and invert right and wrong”, literally “to point to a deer and call it a horse”) (see that entry for more).”
Source: Wiktionary: 馬鹿 (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
- 混種語 Hybrid
- Words that mix layers, e.g. a native part with a Chinese one.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.