First opened Tuesday, July 11, 2006
影
かげ
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
shade, shadow, other side
Kage is an unbound apophonic form, from Proto-Japonic *kankay, cognate with 陰 (kage, “shadow”).
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 影
In a sentence
噂をすれば影がさす。
Speak of angels and you hear their wings.
深海で君の影がゆれる。
It is your shadow in the deep sea.
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.
- “Unbound apophonic form of 影 (kaga).”
- “From Old Japanese, ultimately from Proto-Japonic *kankay. Cognate with 陰 (kage, “shadow”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 影 (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 影 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not かげ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
かが
- “Bound apophonic form of 影 (kage).”
えい
- “From Middle Chinese 影 (MC 'jaengX).”
- “The kan'on pronunciation, so likely a later borrowing.”
よう
- “From Middle Chinese 影 (MC 'jaengX).”
- “The goon pronunciation, so likely the initial borrowing.”
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.