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Did 初める（はじめる） used to exist as a verb? It's not present today except as a
frequent tripping stone for kanji autocomplete. However, the 初めまして word's まして
seems to imply that this was a verb that could take a ます helper verb at the
end of its stem form. Or is it perhaps an entirely different derivation of まして
? Or was it initially 始める ー＞ 始めて and then the other kanji got substituted in
as an alternative?
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question
grammar etymology history
Where did 初めて and 初めまして come from, if not from 初める（はじめる not そめる)?
> Did 初める（はじめる） used to exist as a verb?

It still does. See various dictionaries, such as the monolingual [Daijisen
entry at
Kotobank](https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%88%9D%E3%82%81%E3%82%8B-555334), or the
bilingual entry in the [Weblio E-J / J-E
dictionary](https://ejje.weblio.jp/content/%E5%88%9D%E3%82%81%E3%82%8B).

> i'm just asking about the origin of the word - if it used to be 始めまして and
> then the kanji 初 was inserted later, then that's the history. if 初める existed
> separately and first, then that's the history.

はじむ came first, possibly pronounced as //hazimu//. This appears all the way
back in some of the earliest Japanese texts, such as the
[万葉集【まんようしゅう】](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27y%C5%8Dsh%C5%AB) completed
in 759. For any _kun'yomi_ word, all kanji spellings are secondary, and pretty
much any kanji comes from Chinese. So neither the 初 nor 始 spellings are
"original", both were borrowed from Chinese and applied to an already-existing
Japanese word.

_(I say "pretty much any" instead of "all", since there are always exceptions
-- some kanji were invented in Japan, often for native terms. These are called
国字【こくじ】, literally "national characters". Examples include 畑【はたけ】 ("dry
cultivated field") or 峠【とうげ】 ("mountain pass"). But even here, the words
existed first, and the kanji were invented and applied later. Consider even
English: the spelling "cough" was invented long after the word existed.)_
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answer