First opened Wednesday, August 1, 2007
生涯
しょうがい
- 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).
one's lifetime
Shōgai, “one's lifetime”, began as syaugai.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Wiktionary's text doesn't split this word, so each part is one of its kanji (with the okurigana written after it), with the reading and the dictionary meaning KANJIDIC2 gives that character — a word doesn't always use every sense of its kanji.
In a sentence
彼女は生涯独身であった。
She remained single all her life.
彼は幸せな生涯を送った。
He lived a happy life.
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.
- “/syaugai/ → /syoːgai/.”
Source: Wiktionary: 生涯 (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
- 漢語 Sino-Japanese
- Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.