母
Meaning in Englishmy mother
Animated kanji stroke order
Related sentences
Word context
What it means
What does 母 mean? 母 (haha) refers to the mother — the female parent or primary female caregiver in a family, covering biological, adoptive, and social maternal roles; it names the person who gives birth to or raises a child and appears in everyday speech, formal records, and compound words that relate to maternity and origin.
Main meanings
- Used with honorifics to address or refer politely to someone else's mother rather than to the speaker's own parent.
- Appears in compounds to mean “source” or “origin” (for example, terms indicating an originating body or root concept).
- Figurative and poetic uses that personify a nurturing source (e.g., mother earth, mother sea) rather than a literal parent.
- Legal, medical, and administrative sense specifying the woman legally recorded as a child’s mother.
How to use it
Used across registers: the neutral word for one’s own mother in speech is 母 (haha) when talking about her to others, while polite direct address uses an honorific form such as お母さん (okaasan); the single kanji 母 is common in written language and in compound terms relating to maternity, origin, or institutional roles.
Variants and close terms
- お母さん (okaasan) — polite form used to address or refer to someone else's mother
- 母親 (ははおや, hahaoya) — formal/neutral term for mother
- 母ちゃん (かあちゃん, kaachan) — colloquial, familiar form used within family
- 父 (ちち, chichi) — antonym: father
Composition
The kanji 母 is a single-character pictograph representing a woman with breasts; its shape historically emphasized maternal anatomy and nurturance, and it functions as its own radical and semantic unit rather than as a multi-character compound.
Origin
The character arrived in Japan with Chinese writing (kanji) around the 5th–6th century CE; it was adopted into Japanese literacy and used in classical texts, family registers, and religious writings where the social role of the mother has long been recognized in household and community structures.
Word class
noun (名詞)