First opened Friday, June 12, 2009
考える
かんがえる
- 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 think (about); to consider
“To think” has a long run of sound changes from kamugapu, and a handful of rival theories for its start.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
Written with 考
In a sentence
考えておくよ。
I'll think about it.
何考えてんだ？
Where's your head at?
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “*/kamukapu/ → /kamuɡapu/ → /kanɡafu/ → /kanɡaferu/ (regular change for lower bigrade verbs) → */kangaweru/ (semi-regular sound shift for the /f/ phoneme; see ハ行(ぎょう)転(てん)呼(こ) (ha-gyō tenko)) → /kanɡajeru/ (semi-regular sound shift, collapsing /we/ into /je/) → /kanɡaeru/”
- “From Old Japanese. First cited to the Nihon Shoki of 720.”
- Hedged“Ultimate derivation uncertain. Theories include:”
- Hedged“* Given the ancient kamugapu spelling, may be ka + mukau, where the ka is an unidentified prefixing element, or possibly 処(か) (ka), cognate with the こ (ko) in location determiners like ここ (koko, “here”) and どこ (doko, “where”), and the mukau is 向(む)かう (mukau, “to face something, to face a direction”, pronounced as mukapu in ancient times), from the sense of facing a thing or issue to thoroughly inspect it and think it over. The shift from mukapu to mugapu may be an example of assimilation and lenition, where the preceding /m/ softens the following /k/.”
- Hedged“* Alternatively, may be derived from the on'yomi of kan for the character 勘(かん) (kan, “intuition, perception”, prior to the development of the kana ん, this was spelled as kamu), plus some unknown element that was probably originally kapu, changing to gapu due to rendaku. The semantically relevant verbs with ancient readings of kapu, such as 変(か)える (kaeru, “to change”) all have to do with ideas of changing or turning, suggesting a possible original meaning of to change one's perception.”
- “In addition, there are also obsolete readings of かうがふ (kaugafu, /m/ elided; compare the change of suffix む (-mu) to う (-u) or the usage of 柑(かん) (kan) in 柑(こう)子(じ) (kōji)), and かがふ (kagafu, /mu/ elided completely, as in man'yōgana or nanori usage of kanji like 安), giving further support for this etymology.”
Source: Wiktionary: 考える (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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.