First opened Friday, January 20, 2006
眠る
ねむる
- 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 sleep
Nemuru shifted from neburu, from the same root as Old Japanese 寝 (nu), which gives 寝る (neru).
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 眠
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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.
- “Shift from ねぶる (neburu), from the same root with Old Japanese 寝 (nu) (whence 寝る (neru, “to sleep; to lie down”)), in turn from Proto-Japonic *naynpuru. Cognate with Kunigami 眠ん (ninbin /níɴbîɴ/), Northern Amami Ōshima 眠るり (nïbururi), Okinawan 眠じゅん (ninjun /níɴdʑùɴ/), Okinoerabu 眠ゆん (nibuyun /nìbújúɴ/), Southern Amami Ōshima 眠っゆむっ (nïpyum /nɨ́pjùm̩/), 眠りゅむっ (nïpryum /nɨ́pɾʲùm̩/), Tokunoshima 眠びゅい (ninbyui /nɪ́ɴbʲúɪ́/), Yoron 眠ゆん (nibuyun /nìbùjùɴ/), Miyako 眠ゔっ (niv), Yaeyama 眠ん (ninbun /níbùɴ/), and Yonaguni 眠どぅん (nindun /níɴdúɴ/).”
- “Compare 眠い (nemui, “sleepy”), 眠たい (nemutai, “sleepy”), and おねむ (o-nemu, “(childish) sleepiness, sleep”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 眠る (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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.