First opened Sunday, April 4, 2010
酒
さけ
- 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).
alcohol, sake
Three theories for sake — “flourish”, “ward off” cold illness, or a corruption of kushi — and none is settled.
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.
Written with 酒
In a sentence
酒におぼれるな。
Don't indulge yourself too much in drinking.
酒でも飲もうよ。
Let's have a drink or something.
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.
- “⟨sake₂⟩ → /sakəɨ/ → /sake/”
- “From Old Japanese 酒 (sake₂), from Proto-Japonic *sakai. Cognate with Proto-Ryukyuan *sake. Attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE, with the ideographic spelling 酒. Additionally, appears in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE and the Man'yōshū of c. 759 CE. This is the standalone form of saka- below.”
- Hedged“Various theories exist regarding the ultimate derivation:”
- Hedged“* Might be cognate with 栄(さか)え (sakae), the 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 栄(さか)える (sakaeru, “to flourish”).”
- Hedged“* Might be derived from 避(さ)ける (sakeru, “to ward off, to shun”), from the idea that drinking alcohol would ward off cold diseases.”
- Hedged“* Might be derived from or a corruption of 酒(くし) (kushi, “rice wine, rice vodka, sake”); however, the phonological shifts required are completely unexplainable.”
- Hedged“* The final -ke may be an apophonic form of Old Japanese 酒 (ki₁).”
Source: Wiktionary: 酒 (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 酒 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not さけ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
さか
- “From Old Japanese 酒 (saka). Likely the original form of sake above. Rarely used in isolation. Mostly used as the first element in compounds.”
ささ
- “Originally a 女(にょう)房(ぼう)詞(ことば) (nyōbō kotoba, literally “women's word”) term, possibly derived from reduplication of the first syllable sa from sake. Alternately, may be derived by metaphor from the Chinese-derived euphemism for sake, 竹(ちく)葉(よう) (chikuyō, literally “bamboo leaves”), as 笹(ささ) (sasa) refers to a type of short, leafy bamboo.”
しゅ
- “From Middle Chinese 酒 (MC tsjuwX).”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.