First opened Thursday, April 14, 2011
籠
かご
- 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).
basket, cage
Kago appears to be an uncertain element ka plus 籠 (ko), with ko voiced to go.
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 籠
In a sentence
少年はかごから鳥を放した。
The boy released a bird from the cage.
かごは苺でいっぱいでした。
The basket was filled with strawberries.
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“Appears to be derived from a compound of an uncertain element ka and 籠 (ko) below, with ko changing to go as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
Source: Wiktionary: 籠 (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 籠 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not かご. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
こ
- “⟨ko₁⟩ → /kʷo/ → /ko/”
- “From Old Japanese.”
ろう
- “From Middle Chinese 籠 (MC luwng) and 籠 (MC luwngX).”
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).
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.