First opened Wednesday, July 11, 2012
宙返り
ちゅうがえり
- 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).
somersault, looping-the-loop
Chūgaeri is 宙 (chū, “mid-air”) plus 返り (kaeri), the stem of 返る (kaeru).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Wiktionary's text doesn't split this word, so each part is one of its kanji (with the okurigana written after it), with the reading and the dictionary meaning KANJIDIC2 gives that character — a word doesn't always use every sense of its kanji.
In a sentence
宙返りするジェットコースターに乗ったら、気持ち悪くなっちゃった。
I got sick riding the roller coaster with the loop-the-loop.
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.
- “宙(ちゅう) (chū, “mid-air”) + 返(かえ)り (kaeri, 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 返(かえ)る (kaeru)).”
Source: Wiktionary: 宙返り (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
- 混種語 Hybrid
- Words that mix layers, e.g. a native part with a Chinese one.
- 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).