First opened Sunday, May 5, 2013
霞む
かすむ
- 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 grow hazy, to be misty
Kasumu is from Old Japanese and cognate with 霞める (kasumeru, “to blur, to obscure”) and かすか (kasuka, “faint, dim”).
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 霞
In a sentence
目がかすみます。
I have bleary eyes.
近くの物がかすんで見えます。
Close things look blurred.
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 Old Japanese.”
- “From stem kasu-, cognate with its active counterpart 霞(かす)める (kasumeru, “to blur, to obscure”), adjective かすか (kasuka, “faint, dim”, and its classical form 幽(かすけ)し (kasukeshi)), adverb かすかす (kasukasu, “barely”), verb 掠(かす)める (kasumeru, “to rob; to sweep over”),, and verbs 擦(かす)る (kasuru, “to graze, to touch lightly”) and かすれる (kasureru, “to graze; to be blurred; to be hoarse”).”
- “Cognate with 霞(かす)む (kasumu, “to grow hazy, to become blurry”) above.”
Source: Wiktionary: 霞む (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.