Karate is the Japanese martial art of striking with the hands and feet — fast punches, kicks and blocks, practised in a white suit with a coloured belt. Do karate, a karate class, a black belt in karate.
The belts run from white through several colours to black, and black is the beginning of the graded ranks rather than the end. Note that karate is one of several Japanese martial arts and is not interchangeable with judo, which is about throws and grappling, or aikido, which redirects an attacker's force. Karate chop is an English coinage that no karate practitioner uses.
1nounkarateA Japanese martial art using strikes with the hands and feet.
“She has done karate since she was seven.”
karate is a martial art.
Japanese karate means empty hand — kara, empty, and te, hand. The name announces the whole discipline: fighting without a weapon. The first character was earlier written to mean Chinese, and was changed in the twentieth century to the one meaning empty.
Japanese - 空%手, from 唐%手, an ryu - 唐手.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA