First opened Wednesday, December 5, 2007
餅
もち
- flat (heiban)
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).
sticky rice cake
Mochi shifted from older mochii, historical mochihi; the page compares モモンガ (momonga) for a similar shift.
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 餅
In a sentence
彼は餅をすっかり食べたわけではない。
He didn't eat all of the rice cakes.
もちを食べている時にのどに詰まらせて窒息死する老人がたくさんいる。
Many old people choke to death while eating mochi.
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.
- “/mot͡ɕiː/ → /mot͡ɕi/”
- “Shift from older mochii, historical mochihi (see below). Now the modern term for a glutinous rice cake.”
- “Compare モモンガ (momonga, “Japanese dwarf flying squirrel”), with a similar shift.”
Source: Wiktionary: 餅 (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 餅 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not もち. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
もちい
- “⟨moti ipi₁⟩ → */motipʲi/ → /mot͡ɕifi/ → /mot͡ɕiwi/ → /mot͡ɕiː/”
- “First attested in the Wamyō Ruijushō (938 CE).”
- “Shift from 糯飯 (mochi-ii), itself a compound of 糯 (mochi, “glutinous rice”) + 飯 (ii, “cooked grains”).”
かちん
- “First attested in Muromachi period texts.”
- “Originally a 女房詞 (nyōbō kotoba, literally “woman's language”) term, derived as a compound of 搗ち (kachi), the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of verb 搗つ (katsu, “to pound in a mortar”) + 飯 (ii, “cooked grains”). The final ん (-n) is likely an informal suffix. Listed as cachin in the Nippo Jisho of 1603.”
あも
- “/amːot͡ɕi/ → /amːo/ → /amo/”
- “A shift from 餡餅 (anmochi, “red bean-paste mochi”), deriving from baby talk. Appears in the Nippo Jisho of 1603, described as “Palaura de mulheres, 🙰 mininos” (“a women's and children's word”).”
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.