物
Meaning in Englishthing, object
Animated kanji stroke order
Related sentences
Word context
What it means
物 means "thing" or "object" in Japanese. It functions as a broad, general noun used to refer to tangible items, possessions, phenomena, events or categories of items and can cover both concrete objects and abstract matters depending on context.
Main meanings
- Goods or merchandise, referring to items for sale or trade rather than a single object.
- An affair, matter, or situation when used to talk about issues or abstract topics.
- Organisms or living creatures when combined in compound words that denote beings.
- As a suffix (‑もの) it marks a person characterized by a trait or habit rather than a physical object.
- In some contexts it conveys emotional emphasis or a subjective evaluation of an item or situation.
How to use it
Used broadly in everyday and written Japanese to name objects, possessions, and matters; appears as a standalone noun in casual and formal speech, as a suffix to form nouns describing people or things, and with on readings in technical or compound terms; register varies by compound and collocation rather than by the character itself.
Variants and close terms
- こと (koto) - intangible thing, matter
- 品 (しな, shina) - article, goods, item
- 物品 (ぶっぴん, buppin) - articles, merchandise
- 者 (もの, mono) - person (in some usages where 物 appears as a suffix indicating a person)
Composition
The kanji 物 pairs a semantic component (left) derived from 牜/牛 (cattle/animal) with the phonetic component on the right 勿; the left suggests a link to tangible goods or animals while the right originally supplies sound information, together forming the written sign associated with items and material matters.
Etymology
The character 物 was borrowed from Chinese; its Sino-Japanese on readings reflect historical Chinese pronunciations while the native kun reading (mono) is an Old Japanese lexical item that was paired with the character for its semantic match rather than derived from the Chinese sound.
Origin
The concept and the native word (mono) appear in early Japanese texts and court literature; the kanji 物 arrived with Chinese writing and was used from classical periods to record both material culture and abstract notions, becoming integrated into both everyday speech and written registers.
Word class
noun (名詞, meishi)