First opened Wednesday, March 21, 2012
栄える
さかえる
- 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 flourish, to prosper, to thrive
Sakaeru is cognate with 盛る (sakaru, “to become frisky, to flourish”), ultimately deriving from 咲く (saku, “to bloom”).
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 栄
In a sentence
善人必ずしも栄える者でない。
Not all good men will prosper.
その町は栄えているようだった。
That town looked prosperous.
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.
- “Cognate with 盛る (sakaru, “to become frisky, to flourish”) and 栄す, 盛す (sakasu, “to make something lively”), ultimately deriving from 咲く (saku, “to bloom”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 栄える (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.