First opened Wednesday, January 30, 2008
乗り換える
のりかえる
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 4
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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).
to transfer (trains), to change (bus, train, etc.)
Norikaeru is 乗り (nori, “getting on, riding”) plus 換える (kaeru, “to exchange, to change”).
Taken apart
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In a sentence
乗り換えるのですか。
Do I have to change trains?
新宿で乗り換えなさい。
Change trains at Shinjuku.
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.
- “Compound of 乗り (nori, “getting on, riding”, from verb 乗る noru “to ride, to be on top of”) + 換える (kaeru, “to exchange, to change”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 乗り換える (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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.