I recently encountered the word 鉢巻 / hachimaki here on Wanikani- and its singular definition of “headband” makes sense to me, just a simple noun referring to the article of clothing.
That said, WK lists this word as also being a verbal noun, Jisho lists it as being a Suru verb, and every other site I investigated supports the idea that this term can indeed be used as a verb. The problem is that I have not been able to find any supplementary definitions or context sentences to illustrate what the verb is actually supposed to convey.
My best guess is that it means to wrap something around one’s head(?) but I figured this would be the place to ask for something more specific.
Yeah, near as I can tell from a bit of Googling, 鉢巻(を)する just means “wear a hachimaki”. The Japanese Wiki article uses the phrase just once, in the last paragraph of the history section.
Struggling a bit to get anything definitive, because Google’s mostly just giving me results for 鉢巻 even when I’m googling 鉢巻する.
As far as I can tell, a lot of noun can be turned into a verb (very much like English where a lot nouns could be used as verbs), and it will take the meaning of the main thing you do with that noun. Ofc I have not seen that rule in books anywhere but I’ve heard a lot of Japanese straights up 鉛筆して rather than 鉛筆で書いて or 鉛筆を使って.
Like for example, I could say: I'm gonna **chainsaw** this tree down tonight! and everyone will understand that I will use the chainsaw for its intended way, of cutting the tree down. God forbit me if I actually mean that I’ll hang the chainsaw on the tree and use it as a swing.
Struggling a bit to get anything definitive, because Google’s mostly just giving me results for 鉢巻 even when I’m googling 鉢巻する.
Maybe you already know this, but if you want to force Google to returns results with a specific part of your query, you can scoop that part and put it inside double quotes, like googling "鉢巻する" instead of 鉢巻する
Thanks for the help both @Belthazar and @Spoon1612
Both of your explanations make sense and I think I understand now.
The example sentence WK gave uses 鉢巻を絞める with it interpreted as “wear a headband” and glancing at Bunpro example sentences with the word all follow similar patterns- so I guess I just assumed that it needed an alternative ~“wear” verb.
For looking up stuff like this, I really like collocation search from the University of Tsukuba. Here’s a snippet from the results showing the common verb pairings for 鉢巻き.
Aye, する is absolutely used in the context of getting dressed for the putting-on of accessories and the like - you する things like jewellery, neckties, makeup and so forth. To call them する-verbs though would be a bit… weird.
Some of the JJ dictionaries mark it as a suru verb, so it’s not just JMDICT. 鉢巻する seems to be a lot rarer than 鉢巻をする, though, so I would say that for learning purposes it’s probably simpler to think of it as just a noun.
