First opened Tuesday, February 2, 2010
眼鏡
めがね
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
eye glasses
めがね was “eye metal” first; the kanji came from Chinese later.
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.
In a sentence
私の眼鏡はどこ？
Where are my glasses?
彼は眼鏡を外した。
He took off his glasses.
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.
- Hedged“Probably originally a compound of 目 (me, “eye”) + 金 (kane, “metal”, in reference to the metal used in eyeglass frames). The kane changes to gane as an instance of rendaku (連濁). The spelling is based on an apparent borrowing from Chinese, see the gankyō reading below.”
- “Appears in texts from the late 1500s.”
Source: Wiktionary: 眼鏡 (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 眼鏡 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not めがね. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
がんきょう
- “/ɡankjau/ → /ɡankjɔː/ → /ɡankjoː/”
- “Probably a borrowing from written Chinese 眼鏡 /眼镜 (yǎnjìng). Eyeglasses are first mentioned in Chinese in the 1400s as 靉靆 /叆叇 (aidai?), a transcription of an Arabic term. By the late Ming dynasty, eyeglasses appear in writing as 靉靆即眼鏡 /叆叇即眼镜 (“aidai, i.e. eye-lenses”), using the compound term 眼鏡 /眼镜 (yǎnjìng, literally “eye + lens”). Compare modern Min Nan reading gán-kiàⁿ.”
- “This reading appears in texts from the 1920s.”
What the labels mean
- 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).
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.