Aikido

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /aɪˈkiːdəʊ/

Definitions

1. A Japanese combat practice that focuses on blending with an opponent's actions while employing joint locks and throws for self-defense
2. A martial discipline from Japan that emphasizes harmonizing with an attacker’s movement using locks and throws to protect oneself
3. A combat system originating in Japan which centers around redirecting an opponent’s force through manipulation and control rather than striking

Etymology: Aikido is a modern Japanese art, and its name is built from three ordinary words. "Ai" means together or unify, "ki" means spirit or breath, and "dō" means way, so the whole name reads roughly as the way of unifying one's spirit or energy. The martial sense is what the name was given to describe: a discipline in which a defender blends with an attacker's motion rather than meeting force with force, using joint locks and throws to bring the attacker under control. The word is also a doublet of "hapkido," the Korean martial art. Both come from the same Sino-Japanese and Korean pattern of combining Chinese-derived characters, and their shared root shows in how closely the two names resemble each other. The Korean form and the Japanese form are separate borrowings from the same ancestral characters, so the two arts share a linguistic root even though they developed in different countries.