First opened Saturday, March 27, 2010
傘
かさ
- 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).
umbrella, parasol
Before it meant “umbrella”, 傘 was a rain hat made of bundled reeds or sedges.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
Written with 傘
In a sentence
傘を閉じました。
I closed my umbrella.
傘を置き忘れた。
I left an umbrella behind.
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“From Old Japanese. Attested in a gloss of the Nihon Shoki (720) and Man'yōshū (759) in the ideographic spelling 笠. In turn, from reconstructed Proto-Japonic *kasa (“rain hat”). Possibly related to 重なる (kasanaru, “to overlap, to be layered”, intransitive), 重ねる (kasaneru, “to overlap, to layer”, transitive),.”
- “The term originally refers to a bundle of reeds or sedges used as a rain hat. Following the spread of folding umbrellas in the 900s after their introduction from Baekje or China, the sense gradually shifted to also mean "umbrella".”
Source: Wiktionary: 傘 (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 傘 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not かさ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
からかさ
- “Compound of 唐 (kara, “Chinese; foreign”) + 傘 (kasa, “raingear”). First attested in the Utsubo Monogatari of the late 900s.”
- “Folding umbrellas were originally introduced from overseas, likely either Baekje or China, and this term was coined to refer specifically to this style of raingear, as distinct from the traditional Japanese rain hat.”
さん
- “From Middle Chinese 傘 (MC sanX). Not found in isolation.”
- “The eighty sense is from 仐, the ryakuji or "abbreviated character" form of this kanji, which looks like 八 (“eight”) on top of 十 (“ten”), equating to 八十 (hachijū, “eighty”).”
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.