First opened Sunday, July 30, 2006
深める
ふかめる
- 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 deepen, to heighten, to intensify
Fukameru is the root of 深い (fukai, “deep, profound”) plus -meru, from Classical Japanese 深む (fukamu).
Taken apart
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Written with 深
In a sentence
我々は親睦を深めた。
We deepened our friendship.
彼は生化学の知識を深めた。
He extended the knowledge of biochemistry.
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.
- “深(ふか) (fuka, root of 深(ふか)い (fukai, “deep, profound”)) + める (-meru, “-ify, -en”), developed from Classical Japanese 深(ふか)む (fukamu).”
- “Development”
- “Natural progression from Old and Classical Japanese 下(しも)二(に)段(だん)活(かつ)用(よう) (shimo nidan katsuyō, “lower bigrade conjugation”) verbs ending in -u to modern Japanese 下(しも)一(いち)段(だん)活(かつ)用(よう) (shimo ichidan katsuyō, “lower monograde conjugation”) verbs ending in -eru.”
Source: Wiktionary: 深める (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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.