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sake

nounnouncommon in dialogue

  • //ˈseɪ̯k//
  • /[ˈseɪ̯k]/

Cause, interest or account.

noun

  1. 1

    Cause, interest or account.

    For the sake of argument

    I hope you're right, for all our sakes!

  2. 2

    Purpose or end; reason.

    for old times' sake

    It's not worth risking your life for the sake of getting there a few minutes earlier.

  3. 3

    The benefit or regard of someone or something.

    Ne ãd except thoſe dayes ſhulde be ſhoꝛtened / ſhulde no fleſſe be faved: Butt foꝛ the choſens ſake thoſe dayes ſhalbe ſhoꝛtened.

    When I gave a dinner there was generally a cover laid for him. I liked the man for his own sake, and even had he promised to turn out a celebrity it would have had no weight with me.

    2005, Plato, Sophist. Translation by Lesley Brown. 242a-b. But it will be for your sake that we'll undertake to refute this thesis, […]

  4. 4

    Contention, strife; guilt, sin, accusation or charge.

    And unto Adam He said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.

Etymology

From Middle English sake (“sake, cause”), from Old English sacu (“cause, lawsuit, legal action, complaint, issue, dispute”), from Proto-West Germanic *saku, from Proto-Germanic *sakō (“affair, thing, charge, accusation, matter”), from Proto-Indo-European *seh₂g- (“to investigate”). Akin to West Frisian saak (“cause; business”), Low German Saak, Dutch zaak (“matter; cause; business”), German Sache (“thing; matter; cause; legal cause”), Danish sag, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, and Swedish sak, Gothic 𐍃𐌰𐌺𐌾𐍉 (sakjō, “dispute, argument”), Old English sōcn (“inquiry, prosecution”), Old English sēcan (“to seek”). More at soke, soken, seek.

noun

  1. 1

    Variant of sakéAlternative spelling of saké.

Forms

plural
sakes
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).