The world is full of things. There are big and small things, simple and more complex things, real and fake things, useful and useless things. In Japanese, these things are all 物 (mono, also read as butsu or motsu in compounds), and this word has some quite surprising qualities.

Let's start with things at home, where they may actually be quite a nuisance. A room in which 物が多い (mono ga ōi, there are many things) feels rather tense and disorderly. A 物置 (monooki, storeroom) can help a great deal here, unless it's already overflowing with stuff. If that's the case, there's only one cure to this mono-mania: 物を捨てろ (mono o sutero, throw things away)!

The most convenient thing about 物 is that it is often used to form generic terms that capture a whole bunch of quite different things. Just think of 買い物 (kaimono) for anything one might possibly shop, 建物 (tatemono) as a superordinate term for all conceivable types of buildings, or 乗り物 (norimono) to denote things vehicular, from horse-drawn carriages to roller coasters.