First opened Wednesday, March 17, 2010
森
もり
- 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).
forest
A forest as a heap: mori is probably cognate with 盛り (“heap, pile”), from how woods look from a distance.
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 森
In a sentence
彼は森で迷った。
He lost his way in the woods.
月には森も無い。
Nor are there any woods on the moon.
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.
- “From Old Japanese, first attested in the Man'yōshū (c. 759 CE).”
- Hedged“Probably cognate with 盛り (mori, “heap, pile”), the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) of verb 盛る (moru, “to heap up, to build up into a significant amount”), from the way a forest can look like a heap or mound from a distance.”
Source: Wiktionary: 森 (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.