First opened Monday, September 14, 2009
眺める
ながめる
- 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 view, to gaze at
To gaze is related to “long” — possibly a “becoming long” — or to a “long watching” in the Kojiki.
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 眺
In a sentence
何時間も海を眺めた。
I gazed at the sea for hours.
彼らはお互いを眺めた。
They looked at each other.
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“Modern form of classical 下二段活用 (shimo nidan katsuyō, “lower bigrade conjugation”) verb 眺む (nagamu). Related to adjective 長い (nagai, “long”), possibly deriving from 長 (naga, “long”) + む (mu, verbalizing suffix, with an underlying meaning of “becoming that way”). Alternatively, may originally derive from the compound 長眺 (naga me, literally “long watching, long gaze”) found in the Kojiki of 711-712 CE.”
- Hedged“Likely related to 詠める (nagameru).”
Source: Wiktionary: 眺める (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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.