First opened Monday, May 29, 2006
明かり
あかり
- 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).
lamplight, light (in general)
Akari originally meant natural light; the lamp sense was expressed with 灯火 (tomoshibi, literally “set alight + fire”).
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 明
In a sentence
明かりがついている。
The light is on.
明かりは自然に消えた。
The light went out by itself.
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.
- “The 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 明(あ)かる (akaru, “to become bright”).”
- “This term originally referred to natural light, while the sense of lamp or lighting was expressed using the term 灯火 (tomoshibi, literally “set alight + fire”). The term akari gained its modern lighting sense during the late Edo period, and has now largely displaced tomoshibi for this sense.”
Source: Wiktionary: 明かり (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).
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.