First opened Saturday, September 23, 2006
柄
え
- 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).
handle (of a sword, dagger, etc.), grip
E, a handle, is a change in meaning from 枝 (e, “branch, stem”).
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 柄
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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.
- “Change in meaning from 枝(え) (e, historically ye, “branch, stem”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 柄 (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 柄 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not え. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
かび
- “From Old Japanese. Used in the Kojiki. Generally regarded as cognate with 黴(かび) (kabi, “mold”), from the shared idea of sprouts or shoots. Appears to be the noun stem of Old Japanese verb かぶ (kabu) (source of modern 黴(かび)る (kabiru, “to go moldy”)), with probable original meaning of to sprout.”
かい
- “/kabi/ → /kapi/ → /kaɸi/ → /kawi/ → /kai/”
- “Alteration of kabi.”
から
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *kara. Origin of particle から (kara, “from, because”).”
から
- “In light of the stem sense, probably derived semantically from origin, source meanings.”
- “Compare also Korean 가락 (garak), similarly used as a counter for long and slender objects.”
がら
- “Alteration of kara, “qualities, characteristics”. Originally only found as a suffix. The kara changes to gara as an instance of rendaku (連濁). The rendaku pronunciation was then later used independently.”
つか
- “Cognate with 束(つか) (tsuka, ancient unit of length, equivalent to the amount covered from pinky to forefinger when gripping something; analogous to English hand).”
- “Both likely derive from verb 付(つ)く (tsuku, “to set to, to attach, to accompany”), particularly as seen in modern Japanese idioms such as 手(て)を付(つ)ける (te o tsukeru, “to set one's hand to something”), 手(て)が付(つ)く (te ga tsuku, “to start using something”, literally “one's hand sets on something”).”
つく
- “Nominalization of verb 付(つ)く (tsuku, “to attach”).”
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.