First opened Thursday, September 22, 2005
限る
かぎる
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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).
to restrict, to limit, to confine
Kagiru has an uncertain origin: it looks related to 鍵 (kagi, “key”), but Japanese references do not make that connection.
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 限
In a sentence
ハイキングは秋に限る。
Autumn is the best season for going on hikes.
我々は資源が限られている。
We have limited resources.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “From Old Japanese. First cited to the Kojiki of 712.”
- Hedged“Further derivation is uncertain.”
- Hedged“While a surface analysis might suggest a relation to 鍵 (kagi, “key”) or its cognate 鉤 (kagi, “lock”), Japanese references do not make such a connection. In addition, the oldest uses of derived noun 限り (kagiri, “limitation, bound, extent”) indicate that the initial sense was one of "limitation" in terms of time, in contrast to 極み (kiwami, “limitation, bound, extent”) in terms of space.”
Source: Wiktionary: 限る (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).
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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.