First opened Monday, August 22, 2005
傾く
かたむく
- 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).
to incline toward, to slant, to lurch
Katamuku began as katabuku: the b lost its plosive and became a nasal m.
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 傾
In a sentence
太陽が西に傾いた。
The sun declined westward.
この家は傾いている。
This house is leaning to one side.
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.
- “/katabuku/ → /katamuku/”
- “Shift from katabuku (see Etymology 2), the medial /-b-/ loses plosive and becomes a nasal /-m-/.”
Source: Wiktionary: 傾く (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 傾く on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not かたむく. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
かたぶく
- “From Old Japanese.”
かぶく
- “From 頭 (kabu, “head”) + く (-ku, verbal suffix).”
- “The kanji is jukujikun (熟(じゅく)字(じ)訓(くん)), likely from the tilt sense.”
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.