First opened Wednesday, January 23, 2008
墨
すみ
- tail-high (odaka): 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).
ink
Sumi is first attested in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE with the phonetic spelling 須彌, and is cognate with 炭 (sumi, “charcoal”).
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 墨
In a sentence
墨を染料として使うと面白い模様ができます。
India ink produces an interesting pattern when used as a dye.
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, first appearing in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE with the phonetic spelling 須彌 ⟨sumi₁⟩. Cognate with 炭 (sumi, “charcoal”).”
- “In turn, from Proto-Japonic *sumi. Cognate with Southern Amami Ōshima 墨 (sïmi).”
- Hedged“Possibly derived from the homophonous 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) 済み (sumi) of verb 済む (sumu, “to finish, to conclude”), from the way that cinders are left after a fire has finished burning.”
- Hedged“Possibly also related to 煤 (susu, “soot”), from which India ink is made.”
Source: Wiktionary: 墨 (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.