First opened Saturday, January 27, 2007
申す
もうす
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
-- extra-modest (humble) expression for 言う (いう) --
Mōsu, the humble “to say”, was mawosu in Old Japanese.
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 申
In a sentence
鈴木と申します。
This is Mr Suzuki speaking.
アンドレアと申します。
My name is Andrea.
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.
- “⟨mawosu⟩ → */mawusu/ → /mausu/ → /mɔːsu/ → /moːsu/”
- “Shift from Old Japanese 申す (mawosu), Late Old Japanese mausu.”
Source: Wiktionary: 申す (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 申す on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not もうす. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ます
- “/mausu/ → */maːsu/ → /masu/”
- “Thought to be a shift from mōsu above, historical mausu.”
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.