First opened Monday, October 6, 2008
瓦
かわら
- 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).
roof tile
The source says 瓦, “roof tile”, is probably from Sanskrit, possibly via Middle Chinese.
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 瓦
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “/kapara/ → /kaɸara/ → /kawara/”
- Hedged“Probably from Sanskrit कपाल (kapāla, “cup, bowl, skull”), possibly via Middle Chinese 迦波羅 (MC kae pa la). Along with Buddhism, roof tiles came to Japan in the Asuka period.”
- “Cognate with 骨, 䯊 (kawara, “a bone, particularly a covering bone such as a skull or kneecap”).”
- “Folk etymologies include:”
- Hedged“* From 変わら (kawara), the 未然形 (mizenkei, “incomplete form”) of verb 変わる (kawaru, “to change”), from the idea that tiles were produced by changing the clay into pottery through firing”
Source: Wiktionary: 瓦 (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 瓦 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not かわら. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
が
- “From Middle Chinese 瓦 (MC ngwaeX|ngwaeH).”
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.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.