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karate

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//kəˈɹɑː.ti//
  • United Kingdom//kəˈɹɑː.teɪ//
  • United States//kəˈɹɑ.ti//
  • //kəˈrɑt̪e//

An Okinawan martial art involving primarily punching and kicking, but additionally, advanced throws, arm bars, grappling and all means of fighting.

noun

  1. 1

    An Okinawan martial art involving primarily punching and kicking, but additionally, advanced throws, arm bars, grappling and all means of fighting.

    Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, Wall taught karate at a local nursing home.

Etymology

Borrowed from Japanese 空(から)手(て) (karate), from 唐(から)手(て) (karate), an orthographic borrowing from Okinawan 唐手(とーでぃー) (tōdī, “Chinese hand”).

verb

  1. 1

    informalTo attack (somebody or something) with karate or similar techniques.

Forms

past tense
karated
past participle
karated
present participle
karateing
third person singular
karates
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).