First opened Saturday, December 20, 2008
挟む
はさむ
- middle-high (nakadaka): 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).
to pinch; to hold between; to insert
挟む appears to be the Old Japanese root pasa plus the verb-forming suffix む (mu).
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
Written with 挟
In a sentence
彼は耳に鉛筆を挟んだ。
He stuck his pencil behind his ear.
ドアに指をはさまれた。
I had my fingers caught in the door.
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 from Old Japanese. First attested in isolation with unambiguous phonetics in 950. Also attested in compound verb sashihasamu in the Kojiki of 712, but the relevant section of text is written in kundoku (a kind of written Classical Chinese read out in Japanese) in the ideographic spelling 刺挟, and the phonetic realization as Japanese is not clearly attested until later.”
- Hedged“Derivationally, this appears to be Old Japanese root pasa (modern hasa) + verb-forming suffix む (mu, “seem like, look like; treat like; make like”). Root pasa may be a kind of ablaut cognate with poso as reflected in modern adjective 細い (hosoi, “narrow”), and adverbs 細々 (hosoboso, “narrowly”, iterative, repetitive), ほっそり (hossori, “narrowly, skinnily”, stative). Root pasa is also reflected in modern noun 稲架 (hasa, “frame for drying sheaves of harvested rice”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 挟む (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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.