First opened Saturday, April 13, 2013
緩む
ゆるむ
- 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 become loose, to slacken
Yurumu is 緩い (yurui, “loose”) plus む (mu, “-ize, -en”, verbal suffix).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Written with 緩
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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 緩(ゆる)い (yurui, “loose”) + む (mu, “-ize, -en”, verbal suffix).”
- “Occasionally pronounced with a medial /b/ as 緩(ゆる)ぶ (yurubu), especially historically. Copmpare similar alternation of /m/ and /b/ seen in 寒い (sabui, samui), 寂しい (sabishii, samishii, “lonely, desolate”), 頭 (tsuburi, tsumuri, “head”), and 煙 (keburi, kemuri, “smoke”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 緩む (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).
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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.