First opened Friday, November 30, 2012
努めて
つとめて
Pitch accent: We don't have the data for this section. No accent list gives this spelling and reading, or the two we check against disagree.
make an effort!, work hard!
Tsutomete extends the regular verb form 務めて (tsutomete), from 務める (tsutomeru, “to make an effort, to work at something”).
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 努
In a sentence
彼は努めて雇い主を満足させようとした。
He was zealous in satisfying his employer.
人質にとられながら、彼は努めて勇敢に振る舞った。
He tried to brave it out while held as a hostage.
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.
- “Extension of regular verb form 務めて (tsutomete), from 務める (tsutomeru, “to make an effort, to work at something”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 努めて (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.