First opened Monday, August 13, 2007
逆さ
さかさ
- 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).
reverse, upside down
Sakasa is a clipping of 逆様 (sakasama), of the same meaning.
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 逆
In a sentence
弟は絵をさかさに掛けた。
My brother hung the picture upside down.
彼はボールペンを逆さに持った。
He held a ball-point by the wrong end.
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.
- “Clipping of 逆(さか)様(さま) (sakasama), of the same meaning.”
Source: Wiktionary: 逆さ (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.
- Clipping
- A longer word or phrase shortened in everyday use.