First opened Thursday, May 14, 2009
仮名遣い
かなづかい
- 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).
kana orthography, syllabary spelling
Kana orthography is “kana use” — and the つかい voices to づかい.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
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.
- “Compound of 仮名(かな) (kana, “kana”) + 遣(つか)い (tsukai, “use”).”
- “The tsukai changes to zukai as an instance of rendaku (連濁)”
Source: Wiktionary: 仮名遣い (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
- 混種語 Hybrid
- Words that mix layers, e.g. a native part with a Chinese one.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).