First opened Tuesday, December 11, 2007
借り
かり
- 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).
borrowing, debt, loan
Kari was the stem of classical 借る (karu, “to borrow”), and is now also the stem of 借りる (kariru).
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 借
In a sentence
私は母に借りがある。
I owe what I am to my mother.
君に１０ドルの借りがある。
I owe you ten dollars.
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.
- “Originally the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) of classical verb 借る (karu, “to borrow”), now also the 連用形 (ren'yōkei) of modern verb 借りる (kariru, “to borrow”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 借り (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.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.