First opened Wednesday, January 16, 2013
固める
かためる
- flat (heiban)
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 harden, to freeze, to fortify
Katameru is かた (kata, “hard; solid”, root of かたい) plus める (-meru, “-ify”).
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 固
In a sentence
守りを固めろ！来るぞ！
Tighten the defences! They're coming!
彼は粘土を火に入れて固めた。
He hardened clay by putting it into a fire.
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.
- “From かた (kata, “hard; solid”, root of かたい) + める (-meru, “-ify”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 固める (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.