Four borrowings link Greek, Latin, English, Japanese, and English again. Along the way: Greek word formation, an English change of sense, and Japanese clipping and compounding. So the picture is a road.

• Colour is the language holding the word. It changes four times, and each change is a border crossing: a solid line where the word changes hands, a dotted one for a change inside one language.
• Watch what it is about. A movement, then the floor you make the movement on, then the seats facing that floor, then the people sitting in them, then a recording of those people, then their absence. Six meanings, none of them wrong at the time.
• 空 kara is the only native part. Everything else in karaoke is a Greek word for dancing, worn down by four languages over two and a half thousand years.
• English got half its own word back. Oke is orchestra, lent to Japan around 1900 and clipped from six morae to two before it came home in 1979.

Datings take the earliest well-sourced attestation and name the source in each note: Etymonline records the musicians’ sense of orchestra by 1720, Merriam-Webster dates English karaoke to 1977, Nihon Kokugo Daijiten cites Japanese ōkesutora in 1905–06, and Maekawa Yōichirō traces karaoke to 1956, two decades before the boom. The deeper etymology of the Greek verb is not settled, and the chart says so rather than inventing a Proto-Indo-European root for it.

Elsewhere: The Same Idea · The Missing N · Flat-Foot · Polite Company · The Same Word · Signs for Sounds · The Second Alphabet · Twenty-Two Letters · Brahmi's Daughters · Heartwood · Every Language Family