First opened Thursday, December 24, 2009
凹む
へこむ
- flat (heiban)
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 be dented, to be indented
To be dented is to have “lessened inward” — herikomu worn down to hekomu.
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 凹
In a sentence
トムは彼女にフラれてへこんでいる。
Tom is depressed because his girlfriend left him.
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.
- “/herikomu/ → /hekomu/”
- “Contraction of 減りこむ (herikomu), itself a compound of 減り (heri, “lessening, becoming less”, the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) of verb 減る heru, “to reduce, to become less”) + 込む (komu, “to go inwardly”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 凹む (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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.