First opened Wednesday, June 13, 2012
賄う
まかなう
- 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 give board to, to provide meals, to pay
Makanau is from Old Japanese, attested in the Kojiki (712) with the spelling 麻迦那波而.
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 賄
In a sentence
父親は家族の生活をまかなう。
A father provides for his family.
この品物の値段では製造費をまかなえない。
The price of this article does not cover the cost of its manufacture.
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.
- “From Old Japanese; attested in the Kojiki (712) with the spelling 麻迦那波而.”
Source: Wiktionary: 賄う (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.