karate.
karate; an unarmed martial art originating in Okinawa, based chiefly on punches, kicks, defensive blocks and open-hand techniques
Meaning & usage
karate; an unarmed martial art originating in Okinawa, based chiefly on punches, kicks, defensive blocks and open-hand techniques
Han er nordisk mester i karate.
Where this word comes from
Borrowed from English karate, from Japanese 空手 (karate, “empty hand”). The modern Japanese spelling is analyzable as 空 (kara, “empty”) + 手 (te, “hand”). It replaced the earlier 唐手 (karate, “Chinese hand”), an orthographic borrowing from Okinawan 唐手 (tōdī, “Chinese hand”). During the early twentieth century, the first character was changed from 唐 (kara, “Tang dynasty; China”) to the homophonous 空 (kara, “empty”), while the pronunciation remained unchanged. Compare Norwegian Nynorsk karate, Danish karate, Swedish karate, Icelandic karate, German Karate, French karaté and Finnish karate (“karate”).
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.