First opened Friday, August 27, 2010
彼
かれ
- 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).
he, boyfriend
Kare is 彼 (ka, “that, yon”) plus れ (-re); the male sense of “he” only arose later.
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 彼
In a sentence
彼を見張れ。
Keep watch on him.
彼も来ない。
He isn't coming, either.
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.
- “From Old Japanese. Compound of 彼 (ka, “that, yon”) + れ (-re, nominalizing suffix for demonstratives). Found in the Man'yōshū compiled around 759.”
- Hedged“The sense development seems to have proceeded from "that thing over there" to "that person over there [of indeterminate gender]". The specifically male sense of "he" only arose later during the late Edo period and early Meiji period, influenced by translations of texts from European languages.”
Source: Wiktionary: 彼 (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 彼 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not かれ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
か
- “From Old Japanese.”
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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.