First opened Tuesday, August 14, 2012
敢えて
あえて
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
dare (to do), venture (to do), challenge (to do)
Aete is 敢え (ae, the stem of 敢ふ (afu, “to bear, endure”)) plus て (te, conjunctive suffix).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Written with 敢
In a sentence
あえて行くに及ばない。
You need not take the trouble to go.
私はあえて彼女に忠告した。
I ran a risk of advising her.
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.
- “敢(あ)え (ae, 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 敢(あ)ふ (afu, “to bear, endure”)) + て (te, conjunctive suffix)”
Source: Wiktionary: 敢えて (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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.