First opened Wednesday, April 19, 2006
峠
とうげ
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 3
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).
ridge, (mountain) pass, difficult part
Tōge, a mountain pass, is a sound shift from 手向け (tamuke, “tribute to a person about to depart”).
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 峠
In a sentence
私達が峠にさしかかる頃に雨になった。
It began to rain as we came near the pass.
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.
- “/tamuke/ → /taũɡe/ → /tauɡe/ → /tɔːɡe/ → /toːɡe/”
- “Sound shift from 手向け (tamuke, “tribute to a person about to depart”). It is said that these offerings were "given" to them as they traveled into the afterlife, akin to a mountain.”
Source: Wiktionary: 峠 (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 峠 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not とうげ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
たお・たおげ
- “Various nanori readings.”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.