First opened Thursday, December 28, 2006
囲む
かこむ
- 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 surround, to encircle
Kakomu was kakumu in the Nara period, and likely shifted under the influence of 囲う (kakou).
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 囲
In a sentence
その家は木立に囲まれている。
The house stands among trees.
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.
- Hedged“Pronounced かくむ (kakumu) in the Nara period (奈(な)良(ら)時(じ)代(だい) (Nara jidai), 710–794 CE), it was alternately pronounced かこむ (kakomu) since the middle of the Heian period (平(へい)安(あん)時(じ)代(だい) (Heian jidai), 794–1185 CE). The shift to かこむ (kakomu) is likely due to influence from the verb 囲(かこ)う (kakou), of similar meaning.”
- “An alternate pronunciation かごむ (kagomu), with the medial /k/ becoming voiced to /g/, was formerly widely used, as recorded in the 史記抄(しきしょう) (shikishō) written in the Muromachi period (室(むろ)町(まち)時(じ)代(だい) (Muromachi jidai), c. 1336–1573).”
Source: Wiktionary: 囲む (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.