First opened Saturday, December 29, 2007
汲む
くむ
- 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 draw, to scoop, to pump
Kumu, “to draw”, is likely the same word as 斟む (kumu, “to consider people's feelings”) and 酌む (kumu, “to serve sake”).
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 汲
In a sentence
バケツに水を汲んでくるよ。
I'll get a bucket of water.
彼は井戸へ行って水をくんできた。
He fetched some water from the well.
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“Likely the same word as 斟(く)む (kumu, “to consider people's feelings”) and 酌(く)む (kumu, “to serve sake”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 汲む (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.