First opened Wednesday, August 26, 2009
毛皮
けがわ
- 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).
fur, skin, pelt
Fur is “hair-skin” — with a Chinese-derived twin of the same spelling attested centuries earlier.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “Compound of 毛 (ke, “fur, body hair”) + 皮 (kawa, “skin, pelt”). The kawa changes to gawa as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
- Hedged“First cited to a work from 1690, but possibly older, considering the mid-1200s appearance of Chinese-derived homograph 毛皮 (mōhi). This kegawa reading appears to have mostly superseded the mōhi reading.”
Source: Wiktionary: 毛皮 (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 毛皮 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not けがわ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
もうひ
- “Ultimately from Middle Chinese 毛皮 (MC maw|mawH bje).”
- “First cited to the 正法眼蔵 (Shōbōgenzō), a collection of works dated 1231–53 and written by the 13th century Japanese Buddhist monk and founder of the Sōtō Zen school, Eihei Dōgen.”
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.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).