First opened Saturday, February 10, 2007
泉
いずみ
- 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).
spring, fountain
Izumi is 出づ (idu, “to come out”) plus 水 (mi, “water”).
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 泉
In a sentence
彼はその泉の水を飲んだ。
He drank from the spring.
彼らはその泉で喉の渇きをいやした。
They satisfied their thirst at the spring.
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.
- “/idumi/ → /id͡zumi/ → (for most modern Japanese dialects; see also Yotsugana) /izumi/”
- “From Old Japanese. Found in the Man'yōshū, completed some time after 759 CE.”
- “Compound of 出づ (ancient reading idu, modern izu, “to come out”) + 水 (mi, “water”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 泉 (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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.