First opened Thursday, November 11, 2010
噛む
かむ
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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 bite, to chew
Kamu is cognate with Okinawan 食む (kamun, “to eat”), and a doublet of 醸む (kamu, “to brew”).
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 噛
In a sentence
食べ物はよくかむほうがよい。
You might as well chew your food well.
赤ん坊が食べ物をかむようになる。
A baby comes to chew foods.
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.
- “Cognate with Okinawan 食(か)むん (kamun, “to eat”). Doublet of 醸む (kamu, “to brew”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 噛む (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.