First opened Friday, December 21, 2012
お手上げ
おてあげ
- flat (heiban)
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).
given in, given up hope
Oteage is 御 (o, honorific prefix) plus 手 (te, “hand, hands”) plus 上げ (age, “raising”), the stem of 上げる (ageru).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
お手上げだ。
I'm at a complete loss!
本当にお手上げだ。
I'm really up a tree.
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 御 (o, honorific prefix) + 手 (te, “hand, hands”) + 上げ (age, “raising”, the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) of verb 上げる ageru “to raise something”).”
Source: Wiktionary: お手上げ (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.