First opened Saturday, May 12, 2012
籠もる
こもる
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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 seclude oneself, to be confined in
Komoru is from Old Japanese 隠る (komoru), and its stem relates to “fill, filling”, so it is likely cognate with 込む (komu, “to be crowded, be packed”).
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 籠
In a sentence
彼は私に愛情のこもった手紙をくれた。
He sent me an affectionate letter.
老婦人は子供たちに愛情のこもった手を差し伸べた。
The old woman extended a loving hand to the children.
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.
- “⟨ko₂mo₂ru⟩ → */kəməru/ → /komoru/”
- “From Old Japanese 隠る (ko₂mo₂ru).”
- Hedged“The stem kom- relates to “fill, filling”, therefore likely cognate with 込(こ)む (komu, “to be crowded, be packed”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 籠もる (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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.