First opened Friday, June 17, 2005
者
もの
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 2
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).
person (same as 人 (ひと))
Mono, “person”, is first attested in the Nihon Shoki of 720 and is cognate with 物 (mono, “thing”).
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 者
In a sentence
拾った者が持ち主。
Finders keepers.
早い者勝ちですよ。
First come, first served.
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.
- “⟨mo₂no₂⟩ → /mono/”
- “From Old Japanese. First attested in the Nihon Shoki of 720. Theorized to derive from Proto-Japonic *mənə.”
- “Cognate with 物(もの) (mono, “thing”, physical as opposed to abstract).”
- “In ancient texts marked with pronunciation information, this character was always read as hito until around the late 800s, at which point the mono reading becomes prevalent. The mono reading has historically often been used with mild pejorative overtones, as compared to the more neutral term 人(ひと) (hito). This may suggest a broadening of the original “thing” sense for mono, which then was applied as a pejorative for a “person”.”
Source: Wiktionary: 者 (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).
Other readings of 者 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not もの. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
もん
- “/mono/ → /mon/”
- “Shift from mono above.”
しゃ
- “From Middle Chinese 者 (MC tsyaeX).”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.