First opened Tuesday, January 16, 2007
悩む
なやむ
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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 agonize, to be troubled
Nayamu appears in the Man'yōshū of 759 and may derive from 萎える (naeru, “to weaken; to wither”).
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
Written with 悩
In a sentence
何を悩んでるんだ。
What's biting you?
そのことで悩むな。
Don't worry about that.
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.
- “From Old Japanese. Appears in the Man'yōshū completed in 759 CE.”
- Hedged“May be derived from 萎える (naeru, “to weaken; to wither; to bend; to become limp; to become listless”), from the classical form 萎ゆ (nayu) in the irrealis verb stem naya- + suppositional suffix む (mu).”
Source: Wiktionary: 悩む (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.