First opened Thursday, February 5, 2009
元
もと
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 2
- flat (heiban)
The two sources behind the pitch accent disagree about this word, so an accent is shown only where they give the same one.
- Kanjium: falls after mora 1 (head-high (atamadaka)); falls after mora 2 (tail-high (odaka)); flat (heiban)
- UniDic: falls after mora 2 (tail-high (odaka)); 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).
origin, original; former
元, “origin, original; former”, is a doublet of 下 (moto, “base, basis”), and was cited to the Kojiki of 712 CE.
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 元
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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.
- “⟨mo₂to₂⟩ → /moto/”
- “From Old Japanese. Cited to the Kojiki of 712 CE. From Proto-Japonic *mətə. Doublet of 下(もと) (moto, “base, basis”). Cognate with Okinawan 元 (mutu).”
Source: Wiktionary: 元 (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 元 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not もと. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
げん
- “From Middle Chinese 元 (MC ngjwon)”
はじめ
- “From 始(はじ)め (hajime, “beginning”).”
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.