First opened Thursday, December 1, 2011
飲み込む
のみこむ
- flat (heiban)
- 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 gulp down, to swallow deeply, to understand
Nomikomu is 飲み (nomi, the stem of 飲む (nomu, “to drink; to swallow”)) plus 込む (komu, “to go into”).
Taken apart
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In a sentence
蛇が蛙を飲み込んだ。
The snake swallowed a frog.
それを飲み込みなさい。
Drink it down.
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.
- “Compound verb from 飲(の)み (nomi, 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 飲(の)む (nomu, “to drink; to swallow”)) + 込(こ)む (komu, “to go into”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 飲み込む (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.