First opened Friday, March 4, 2011
決める
きめる
- 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 decide (v.t.)
Kimeru is the transitive form of Old Japanese 決む (kimu), a verb that can be either transitive or intransitive.
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 決
In a sentence
わたしたちの会う場所を今きめる必要はありません。
It isn't necessary to make a decision now about where we'll meet.
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.
- “Derived as the transitive form of Old Japanese verb 決む (kimu, “to decide something, to conclude something; to be decided, to be concluded”).”
- Hedged“The source verb kimu appears to follow a common pattern in Old Japanese verbs where the bare form is either transitive or intransitive, depending on context. This pattern persists in some modern verbs, such as つく (tsuku). Many of these Old Japanese verbs developed explicit transitive and intransitive forms, with one group adopting an -aru on the end for the intransitive (as the 未然形 (mizenkei, “irrealis or incomplete form”) ending in -a + the conjugating る (ru) as the basic spontaneous or passive verb ending), and an -eru on the end for the transitive (as the 已然形 (izenkei, “realis or potential form”) + the disappearing る (ru) as a generic verb ending).”
Source: Wiktionary: 決める (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.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.