First opened Thursday, December 15, 2005
重なる
かさなる
- 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).
to be piled up, lie on top of one another
Kasanaru is from Old Japanese; compare 嵩む (kasamu, “to increase”).
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 重
In a sentence
不幸は重なるものだ。
Misfortunes always come in threes.
物事は重なって起こる。
It never rains but it pours.
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.
- “From Old Japanese. Compare 嵩(かさ)む (kasamu, “to increase”), かさ張(ば)る (kasabaru, “to grow bulky”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 重なる (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.