First opened Tuesday, July 17, 2012
歪む
ゆがむ
- flat (heiban)
- 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 warp, to be crooked, to be distorted
Yugamu is from Old Japanese, possibly related to 弓 (yumi, “bow”).
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 歪
In a sentence
彼の顔は苦痛でいがんだ。
His face was twisted with pain.
苦痛で彼の顔が歪んでいる。
His face is distorted by pain.
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.
- Hedged“From Old Japanese, which in turn comes from Proto-Japonic *yOnkamu. Possibly related to 弓(ゆみ) (yumi, “bow”), which appears in compounds as ゆ (yu).”
Source: Wiktionary: 歪む (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).
Other readings of 歪む on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ゆがむ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ひずむ
- “Unknown. Possible shared root with 肘(ひじ) (hiji, “elbow”) and 膝(ひざ) (hiza, “knee”), related to ideas of bending.”
いがむ
- “Phonetic alteration from 歪(ゆが)む (yugamu) above.”
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.