First opened Wednesday, November 2, 2011
名高い
なだかい
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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).
famous, celebrated, well-known
Nadakai is 名 (na, “name”) plus 高い (takai, “high, lofty”), with takai voiced to dakai by rendaku.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
彼女は歌手として名高い。
She is famous as a singer.
その教授はシェークスピアの研究で名高い。
The professor is noted for his study of Shakespeare.
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 名(な) (na, “name”) + 高(たか)い (takai, “high, lofty”).”
- “The takai changes to dakai as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
Source: Wiktionary: 名高い (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).