First opened Thursday, April 1, 2010
雷
かみなり
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 4
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).
thunder
Thunder was originally “god” + “cry out”: 神 (kami) + 鳴り (nari).
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 雷
In a sentence
豪雨は雷を伴った。
The heavy rain was accompanied with thunder.
雷がその塔に落ちた。
Lightning struck the tower.
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.
- “Originally a compound of 神(かみ) (kami, “god, spirit”) + 鳴(な)り (nari, 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 鳴(な)る (naru, “to cry out, to call”)).”
Source: Wiktionary: 雷 (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 雷 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not かみなり. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
かんなり
- “/kaminari/ → /kamʉnari/ → /kanːari/”
- “Shift in pronunciation from kaminari above.”
いかずち
- “⟨ika tu ti⟩ → ⟨ikaduti⟩ → /ikad͡zut͡ɕi/ → /ikazut͡ɕi/”
- “From Old Japanese.”
- “Originally a compound of 厳(いか) (ika, “sternness, terribleness, imposingness”) + つ (tsu, Old Japanese possessive particle) + 霊(ち) (chi, “spirit, force, essence”).”
なるかみ
- “Compound of 鳴(な)る (naru, “to cry out, to call”) + 神(かみ) (kami, “god, spirit”).”
らい
- “From Middle Chinese 雷 (MC lwoj).”
- “Compare modern Mandarin 雷 (léi) and Cantonese 雷 (leoi⁴).”
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.