First opened Monday, September 24, 2012
闇
やみ
- tail-high (odaka): 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).
darkness, shady, illegal
Yami is from Old Japanese, with ultimate roots uncertain, and may be cognate with 病む (yamu, “to be ill”) and 止む (yamu, “to stop, to quit”).
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 闇
In a sentence
一寸先は闇。
Who can read the future?
光は闇を貫く。
The light penetrates the darkness.
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. Ultimate roots uncertain. May be cognate with 病む (yamu, “to be ill”), 止む (yamu, “to stop, to quit”), 黄泉 (yomi, “land of the dead”).”
- “Reconstructed as deriving ultimately from Proto-Japonic *yamui.”
Source: Wiktionary: 闇 (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 闇 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not やみ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
あん
- “From Middle Chinese 闇 (MC 'omH, “dark”).”
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.