First opened Saturday, January 26, 2008
もう
もう
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
- 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).
already; again; more
Mō has an unknown derivation; it was originally まう (mau), first attested in 1477.
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.
In a sentence
もうだめだ。
It's all over.
もう年だよ。
I feel my age.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- Hedged“Derivation unknown. First attested in 1477, around the Muromachi Period.”
- “Historical kana orthography shows that this was originally まう (mau), and Portuguese sources from the late 1500s and early 1600s record this as ⟨mǒ⟩, indicating a pronunciation of /mɔː/ as part of the regular sound shift from /au/ to /oː/.”
- Hedged“The initial ma is speculatively connected to 今 (ima, “now”) (compare both the loss of initial i- in 未だ (imada > mada) or 出る (ideru > deru) and the similar -a → -ō shift seen in emphatic particle のう (nō)). Frellesvig suggests a shift from a topicalized form /ima wa/ → /mau/ → /mɔː/ → /moː/.”
Source: Wiktionary: もう (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).
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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.