First opened Thursday, October 26, 2006
長い
ながい
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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).
long, lengthy
Nagai is first attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE, and is possibly cognate with 流れる (nagareru, “to flow”), in reference to extending.
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 長
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “From Old Japanese. First attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE. From Proto-Japonic *nanka.”
- Hedged“Possibly cognate with 流れる (nagareru, “to flow”, intransitive), and 流す (nagasu, “to flow”, transitive), in reference to extending.”
Source: Wiktionary: 長い (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.