First opened Wednesday, November 7, 2012
司る
つかさどる
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 4
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 rule, to govern, to administer
Tsukasadoru is 官 (tsukasa, “position of authority”) plus 取る (toru, “to take”), with toru voiced to doru by rendaku.
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 司
In a sentence
市長は市政を司る。
The mayor administers the affairs of the city.
その省は内政問題の行政をつかさどる。
The ministry administers the internal affairs.
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.
- “Compound of 官 (tsukasa, “position of authority”) + 取る (toru, “to take”). The toru changes to doru as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
Source: Wiktionary: 司る (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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).