First opened Wednesday, January 9, 2013
崖
がけ
- 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).
cliff
Gake shifted from the older pronunciation kake and was first attested in 1280.
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 崖
In a sentence
私たちはがけのふちに立った。
We stood on the brink of a cliff.
そのがけは海に突き出ている。
The cliff hangs over the sea.
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.
- “Shift from older pronunciation kake. First attested in 1280.”
- Hedged“May be a shift in usage from compounding element kake as in the synonymous terms 懸路 (kakeji), 懸道 (kakemichi, “cliff road, steep mountain road”), where the kake comes from verb 懸ける (kakeru, “to set into; to set across”), from the way the road would be set into the cliff or mountain.”
- Hedged“The change from kake to gake apparently happened some time during the Edo period (1603–1868). This term is recorded as Caqe (then-current Portuguese orthography for modern romanization kake) in the 1603 Nippo Jisho Japanese-Portuguese dictionary.”
Source: Wiktionary: 崖 (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 崖 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not がけ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
がい
- “From Middle Chinese 崖 (MC ngje|ngea, “cliff, precipice”). Not attested in isolation. First attested in compound 崖岸 (gaigan, “cliff shore, cliff bank”) in 900.”
まま
- “From Old Japanese. Further derivation unclear.”
- “First attested in the Man'yōshū of 759.”
- “Modern references either omit this reading entirely or provide no pitch accent information for this reading, suggesting that it might be archaic or even obsolete in modern usage.”
ほき
- “Derivation unclear. First attested in the late 1100s.”
- “Modern references either omit this reading entirely or provide no pitch accent information for this reading, suggesting that it might be archaic or even obsolete in modern usage.”
きし
- “Probably from 岸 (kishi, “shore, bank (of a body of water)”).”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.