First opened Monday, December 31, 2007
弱める
よわめる
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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 weaken
Yowameru is 弱 (yowa, root of 弱い, “weak”) plus -meru, “-en, -ify”.
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 弱
In a sentence
台風は勢力を弱め嵐に変わった。
The typhoon became weaker and changed into a storm.
時は友情を深めるが、恋愛を弱める。
Time, which strengthens friendship, weakens love.
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.
- “From 弱(よわ) (yowa, root of 弱い (“weak”)) + める (-meru, “-en, -ify”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 弱める (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).
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.