First opened Wednesday, January 4, 2006
膨らむ
ふくらむ
- 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).
to expand, to swell (out), to become inflated
Fukuramu, “to swell”, is 膨 (fukura, “a bulge, a swelling”) plus -mu, first cited to the mid-800s.
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 膨
In a sentence
タイヤに空気を入れれば膨らむ。
If you pump air into a tire, it expands.
一陣の風をうけて帆がふくらんだ。
A gust of wind swelled the sails.
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.
- “First cited to the mid-800s.”
- “From 膨, 脹 (fukura, “a bulge, a swelling”) + む (-mu, suffix indicating “looks like, seems like”). The fukura portion is in turn from now-archaic verb 膨る, 脹る (fukuru, “to swell, to bulge”), superseded by modern 膨れる, 脹れる (fukureru) of the same meaning.”
Source: Wiktionary: 膨らむ (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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.