First opened Thursday, August 31, 2006
食物
しょくもつ
- middle-high (nakadaka): 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).
food, foodstuff
Shokumotsu is Middle Chinese 食物, literally “eat + thing”, possibly altered from the goon reading jikimotsu.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
私はたくさんの食物を持って帰ろう。
I will bring back a lot of food.
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.
- “From Middle Chinese 食物 (zyik mjut, literally “eat + thing”). Possible alteration from strict goon reading jikimotsu, changing goon jiki for kan'on shoku.”
Source: Wiktionary: 食物 (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 食物 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not しょくもつ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
じきもつ
- “From Middle Chinese 食物 (zyik mjut, literally “eat + thing”). Possible original reading.”
しょくぶつ
- “From Chinese 食物 (shíwù). Possible reborrowing, or change influenced by later contact with China after borrowing of earlier goon reading jikimotsu.”
What the labels mean
- 漢語 Sino-Japanese
- Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.