First opened Saturday, October 8, 2011
葬る
ほうむる
- 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 bury, to entomb
Hōmuru is often taken as from Old Japanese 葬る (haburu), though the epenthesis of う is uncertain.
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 葬
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.
- Hedged“Often taken as from Old Japanese 葬る (haburu). But the epenthesis of う is uncertain. Another form of it is 葬(ほうぶ)る (hōburu). Another theory derive it from 火(ほ) (ho) and 埋(う)むる (umuru), 連体形(れんたいけい) (rentaikei) of 埋(う)む (umu) (modern 埋(う)める (umeru), but is phonologically and morphologically problematic.”
Source: Wiktionary: 葬る (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.