First opened Tuesday, June 14, 2005
代わり
かわり
- flat (heiban)
How to read it: a line over a kana means the voice is high there, and ↓ marks where it drops. A kana with no line is low. With no ↓ the pitch stays high to the end and does not drop even on a following particle (が, は).
substitute, replacement
Kawari, “substitute”, is the continuative stem of the verb 代わる (kawaru, “to substitute”).
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
Written with 代
In a sentence
父が忙しいので、私が代わりに行きます。
Father is busy, so I will go instead.
誰が彼のかわりをすることが出来ようか。
Who could take the place of him?
Sentences are from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), picked by fixed rules from a dated export and shown unchanged. Nobody has reviewed them one by one.
What Wiktionary says
Quoted line by line from Wiktionary's Etymology section for this reading, taken from one dated dump so it can't change underneath us. Nothing below is paraphrased.
- “連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 代(か)わる (kawaru, “to substitute”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 代わり (dump of 2026-09-02), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Reading, meaning and part of speech from JMdict, and kanji readings from KANJIDIC2 (EDRDG).
Other readings of 代わり on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not かわり. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
がわり
- “As above, with rendaku (連濁).”
What the labels mean
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.