Sake

How to spell sake

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sake

What does sake mean?

1. nounThe benefit, purpose, or interest of someone or something, used chiefly in the phrase 'for the sake of'.
2. nounA traditional Japanese alcoholic drink brewed from fermented rice.

Sake in a sentence

• She kept the meeting brief for the sake of everyone's schedule.

• The restaurant served warm sake with the grilled fish.

• For the sake of clarity, he numbered each step in the report.

• He ordered a small carafe of sake to go with dinner.

Where does sake come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The everyday word comes from Old English 'sacu', which meant a lawsuit, a dispute, or a cause to be argued, and it is closely related to the verb 'seek' and to the German 'Sache', meaning a matter or thing. Over the centuries the legal sense of pleading a 'cause' softened into the modern idea of acting for someone's benefit or purpose, which survives almost entirely in the fixed phrase 'for the sake of'. The same Germanic root also lurks inside 'forsake', meaning to abandon a cause or person. A completely separate word spelled the same way is the Japanese 'sake', the fermented rice drink, borrowed into English in the seventeenth century; despite the identical spelling it is unrelated and is pronounced differently. The two simply collided on the page, which is why the single short spelling carries two histories.

How the word is built

• sake (single Old English root sacu: cause, contention); no affixes