Word.ws English Dictionary

wakizashi

UK/wækɪˈzæʃi//wɑkɪˈzɑʃi/

wakizashi noun: a traditional Japanese shortsword, typically 30cm to 60cm (or nearly 12 inches to approx. 23.6 inches) in length, often used as a secondary weapon to a katana.

wakizashi: a traditional Japanese shortsword, typically 30cm to 60cm (or nearly 12 inches to approx. 23.6...
Image: Samuraiantiqueworld, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

wakizashi (plural wakizashi or wakizashis)

  1. A traditional Japanese shortsword, typically 30cm to 60cm (or nearly 12 inches to approx. 23.6 inches) in length, often used as a secondary weapon to a katana.
    • Hiro shoves Reason back into the zodiac, jumps in, and starts the motor. He doesn’t have time to untie the boat from the pontoon, so he snaps through the line with his wakizashi and takes off.1992, Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, page 384
    • And that was how it went. For five hours. I must have swung a thousand times yet never managed to bring the golem’s health to 0. They had really fast regen. I couldn’t hit fast or hard enough. That changed when Leo showed up. He let me borrow his weapons—a katana and a wakizashi, both made of...2020, Cube Kid [pseudonym; Erik Gunnar Taylor], Tales of an 8-Bit Kitten: A Call to Arms, page 61

Forms of wakizashi

pluralwakizashi
pluralwakizashis

Origin of wakizashi

From Japanese 脇差(わきざし) (wakizashi).

Questions about wakizashi

What does wakizashi mean?
Wakizashi means a traditional Japanese shortsword, typically 30cm to 60cm (or nearly 12 inches to approx. 23.6 inches) in length, often used as a secondary weapon to a katana.
What part of speech is wakizashi?
Wakizashi is a noun.
How do you pronounce wakizashi?
Wakizashi is pronounced /wækɪˈzæʃi/ (UK).
What is the plural of wakizashi?
The plural of wakizashi is wakizashi.

Words near wakizashi in the dictionary

  1. wakings
  2. wakipai
  3. Wakisi
  4. wakiup
  5. wakiups
  6. wakizashi
  7. wakizashis
  8. Wakkaliga
  9. Wakkanai
  10. wakken
  11. wakkened

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wakizashi (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Persent101-wakizashi.wav.

Cite this entry: “wakizashi.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wakizashi. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.