First opened Monday, September 10, 2012
サボる
サボる
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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 cut (skip) classes; to loaf on the job; to idle away one's time
サボる is a clipping of サボタージュ (sabotāju, “idling, truancy”) plus る (-ru, verb-forming suffix), the former from French sabotage.
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.
In a sentence
昨日学校をさぼったの？
You played hooky yesterday?
トムはまた授業をさぼった。
Tom cut classes again.
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.
- “Clipping of サボタージュ (sabotāju, “idling, truancy”) + る (-ru, verb-forming suffix), the former from French sabotage.”
Source: Wiktionary: サボる (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
- 外来語 Loanword
- Words taken from a language other than Chinese, mostly European ones, usually written in katakana.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Clipping
- A longer word or phrase shortened in everyday use.