ごまかす

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.

In a sentence

We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.

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.

• “First recorded in the Edo period.”
• Hedged“According to one theory, formed from 護摩 (goma, “a holy fire in esoteric Buddhism”) + verbalizing suffix かす (kasu), from a common fraud perpetrated in the Edo period of dressing as a monk and selling regular ash purported to be ash from such holy fires.”
• Hedged“Alternatively, from 胡麻菓子 (goma kashi, “sesame candy”), from a particular sesame candy in the Edo period called 胡麻胴乱 (goma dōran) and notable for being a mostly empty shell.”
• “The kanji spellings are examples of ateji. The more common spelling is in hiragana, as ごまかす.”

Source: Wiktionary: ごまかす (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.

Derivation

A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.

Ateji

Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.