First opened Monday, March 24, 2008
被る
かぶる
- 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).
to wear; to be covered with
Kaburu is a contraction of 被る (kagafuru), the medial g voicing p to b.
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 被
In a sentence
帽子をかぶりなさい。
Put your hat on.
変な帽子かぶってるな。
You're wearing an odd cap, aren't you?
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.
- “Contraction of 被る (kagafuru). The medial -g- voices /p/ to /b/.”
Source: Wiktionary: 被る (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).
Other readings of 被る on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not かぶる. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
かがふる
- “/kagapuru/ → /kagaɸuru/.”
かむる
- “From 被る (kaburu). Bilabial plosive /b/ becomes bilabial nasal /m/.”
こうぶる
- “/kagapuru/ → /kauburu/ → /koːburu/.”
こうむる
- “From 被る (kōburu). Bilabial plosive /b/ becomes bilabial nasal /m/.”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.