First opened Tuesday, October 16, 2012
小柄
こがら
- 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).
small, diminutive
Kogara is 小 (ko-, “little”) plus 柄 (gara, “physique, build”).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
彼は小柄な男です。
He has a small frame.
息子は年の割には小柄だ。
My son is small for his age.
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.
- “From 小(こ) (ko-, “little”) + 柄(がら) (gara, “physique, build”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 小柄 (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 小柄 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not こがら. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
こづか
- “From 小(こ) (ko-, “little”) + 柄(つか) (tsuka, “handle”).”
しょうへい
- “From 小(しょう) (shō, “small, little”) + 柄(へい) (hei, “handle, handhold”).”
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.