First opened Tuesday, August 17, 2010
持つ
もつ
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
to hold, to carry; to possess
Motsu is first attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE, with cognates across the Ryukyuan languages.
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 持
In a sentence
底を持ってくれ。
Grab the bottom.
胃がもたれます。
My stomach feels heavy.
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.
- “From Old Japanese. First attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE. Ultimately from Proto-Japonic *mətu.”
- “Cognates”
- “Cognate with Kikai 持ちゅい (muchui), Kunigami 持ちゅん (muchun), Northern Amami Ōshima 持と゚ぅり (muθuri), Okinawan 持ちゅん (muchun), Okinoerabu 持ちゅん (muchun), Southern Amami Ōshima 持ちゅむっ (muchum), Tokunoshima 持つぃ (mutsï), Yoron 持ちゅん (muchun), Miyako 持つぃ (mutsï), Yaeyama 持つん (mutsun), and Yonaguni 持とぅん (mutun).”
Source: Wiktionary: 持つ (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.