First opened Wednesday, October 24, 2007
止める
とめる
- 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 stop (something)
Tomeru, “to stop”, is a doublet of 泊める (tomeru).
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 止
In a sentence
彼をとめるな。
Don't stop him.
ガスを止めろ。
Turn off the gas.
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.
- “Doublet of 泊(と)める (tomeru).”
Source: Wiktionary: 止める (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).
Other readings of 止める on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not とめる. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
やめる
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *yamu.”
- “Cognate with Okinawan 止(や)みゆん (yamiyun).”
- “Doublet of 辞(や)める (yameru, “to quit (a job)”).”
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.