First opened Wednesday, September 21, 2011
仕上げる
しあげる
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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 finish up, to complete
Shiageru is し (shi, “doing”) plus 上げる (ageru, “to raise up; to bring to an end”), from older 仕上ぐ (shiagu).
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
仕事を仕上げましたか。
Have you got through with your work?
すぐ始めて仕上げよう。
Let's start at once and have done with it.
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.
- “Compound of し (shi, “doing”, the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) of verb する suru “to do”) + 上げる (ageru, “to raise up; to bring to an end”). Derived via regular historical processes from older 仕上ぐ (shiagu), a 下二段活用 (shimo nidan katsuyō, “lower bigrade conjugation”) verb.”
- “Compare the English expression to do something up → to do something thoroughly.”
- “The 仕 kanji for the first character is an example of phonetic ateji.”
Source: Wiktionary: 仕上げる (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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.