First opened Wednesday, September 23, 2009
木綿
もめん
- 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).
cotton
Cotton is “tree cotton”, worn down from mokumen to momen by 1560.
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
このブラウスは木綿製です。
This blouse is cotton.
この布はもめんでできている。
This cloth is made of cotton.
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.
- “/mokumen/ → */moɡumen/ → /moɴmen/ → /momen/”
- “Alteration of mokumen via attested form monmen, itself derived from Middle Chinese-derived elements 木 (moku, “tree”) + 綿 (men, “cotton”).”
- “The earlier form monmen is attested in 1468 with a sense of "cotton fibre", with the medial gemination eliding into momen by 1560.”
Source: Wiktionary: 木綿 (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 木綿 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not もめん. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
きわた
- “Compound of 木 (ki, “tree”) + 綿 (wata, “batting”).”
- “First attested in 1589.”
もんめん
- “/mokumen/ → /moɴmen/”
- “Sound shift from expected mokumen reading, with the ku assimilating with the following nasal m. First attested in 1468.”
- “Appears to have been superseded after the non-geminate form momen arose in 1560. May be obsolete in modern usage; this reading is not included in many dictionaries.”
ゆう
- “/jupu/ → /jufu/ → */juwu/ → /juː/”
- “From Old Japanese.”
- “Possibly from the verb 結う (yuu, “to tie up”), from the way such strings are used to tie sakaki branches in Shinto rituals. Compare the development of 夕 (yū, “evening”).”
- “The kanji spelling is an example of jukujikun (熟(じゅく)字(じ)訓(くん)), likely from the similar texture and consistency of cotton.”
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.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.