First opened Sunday, February 27, 2011
働く
はたらく
- 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).
to work
Hataraku is most likely derived from a mimetic word はた (hata), perhaps the sound of objects bumping together.
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 働
In a sentence
彼女はよく働く。
She works hard.
一生懸命働いた。
He worked hard.
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“Most likely derived ultimately from a mimetic word はた (hata, adverb, referring to the sound of objects bumping together), in turn possibly cognate with 旗 (hata, “flag”, from the sound of a flag flapping) and 機 (hata, “a loom”, from the sound of the shuttle or the workings of the batten).”
- “Compare also adverb はたはた (hatahata, “working diligently”), verb はためく (hatameku, “to flutter, flap, flicker, whip”).”
- “First cited in the late 900s, with the sense of "to move one's body".”
Source: Wiktionary: 働く (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.