First opened Friday, April 23, 2010
壁
かべ
- 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).
wall
A wall is a “place divider”: 処 (ka, “place”) + 重 (he, “division”), with he voiced to be.
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 壁
In a sentence
彼は壁にペンキの上塗りをした。
He put the final coat of paint on the wall.
かべにかかっている絵をごらんなさい。
Look at the picture on the wall.
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 処(か) (ka, “place”) + 重(へ) (he, “division”), in reference to walls dividing objects apart. The he changes to be as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
Source: Wiktionary: 壁 (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).