First opened Monday, November 21, 2011
授ける
さずける
- 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 grant, to award, to teach
Sazukeru derives from the classical verb 授く (sazuku), and a surface analysis suggests さ (sa) plus 付ける (tsukeru).
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
Written with 授
In a sentence
委員会は彼にメダルを授けた。
The committee bestowed a medal on him.
監督は彼にトロフィーを授けた。
The manager bestowed a trophy on him.
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.
- “Derived via regular historical shifts from the classical lower bigrade (カ行下二段活用 (ka-gyō shimo nidan katsuyō)) verb 授(さづ)く (sazuku).”
- Hedged“A surface analysis would suggest that this ultimately derives as a compound of さ (sa, of uncertain meaning) + 付ける (tsukeru, “to stick or attach something to something else; to put something somewhere”).”
- “First attested in ideographic form in the Nihon Shoki of 720, and in phonetic spelling in the Man'yōshū of 759.”
Source: Wiktionary: 授ける (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
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.