First opened Wednesday, December 7, 2011
遮る
さえぎる
- 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 interrupt, to intercept, to obstruct
Saegiru is a shift from older さいぎる, itself from さきぎる (sakigiru), 先 (saki, “in front”) plus 切る (kiru, “cut”).
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 遮
In a sentence
彼は私の行く手を遮った。
He blocked my way.
落石が彼の行く手をさえぎった。
A fallen rock barred his way.
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.
- “Shift from the older reading さいぎる, from the syncope of the /k/ in さきぎる (sakigiru), from 先 (saki, “in front”) + 切る (kiru, “cut”), literally “to cut off (from) the front”.”
Source: Wiktionary: 遮る (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).
Other readings of 遮る on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not さえぎる. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
さいぎる
- “Old reading of the more modern さえぎる, originally from 先切(さきき)る (sakikiru)”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.