First opened Wednesday, September 30, 2009
微笑む
ほほえむ
- 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 smile
To smile is to “cheek-smile” — in kanji borrowed from a Chinese “slight smile”.
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.
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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.
- “Compound of 頬 (hoho, “cheek”) + 笑む (emu, “smile”).”
- Hedged“The spelling appears to be an example of jukujikun (熟(じゅく)字(じ)訓(くん)), based on Chinese 微笑 (wēixiào, literally “slight smile”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 微笑む (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
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.