First opened Wednesday, April 14, 2010
煙
けむり
- 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).
smoke, fumes
Smoke was keburi before it was kemuri, and the shorter kemu is a clipping attested since 1275.
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 煙
In a sentence
彼は部屋に満ちていた煙にむせ返った。
He was choked by the smoke which filled the room.
仕事している時に他人のたばこのけむりを吸うのはいやだ。
I don't like to inhale someone's smoke while I'm working.
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.
- “/keburi/ → /kemuri/”
- “Shift from Old Japanese-derived keburi reading (see below) as a regular /b/ → /m/ change. Appears in the Taiheiki of the late 1300s.”
- “Now the most common reading.”
- “/kemuri/ → /kemu/”
- “Clipping of earlier kemuri.”
- “Attested since at least 1275.”
Source: Wiktionary: 煙 (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).
Other readings of 煙 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not けむり. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
けぶり
- “The 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) of verb 煙る (keburu, “to be smoky, to give off smoke”). Appears with this reading in the Man'yōshū.”
けぶ
- “Clipping of earlier keburi.”
えん
- “From Middle Chinese 煙 (MC 'en).”
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.
- Clipping
- A longer word or phrase shortened in everyday use.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.