First opened Monday, September 28, 2009
裏返す
うらがえす
- 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 turn inside out, to turn (something) over
To turn inside out is to “flip” the “back side” — かえす voiced to がえす.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
袋を裏返しにしなさい。
Turn your bag inside out.
彼は肌着を裏返しに着た。
He put on his undershirt inside out.
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.
- “Compound of 裏 (ura, “back side, inside, far side”) + 返す (kaesu, “to flip over, to turn over”). The kaesu changes to gaesu as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
Source: Wiktionary: 裏返す (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.
- 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).