Linguistic term for the grammatical object of a verb. Used in grammar explanations and language study.
In 'He reads a book,' 'book' is the object.
主語 marks who or what performs the action, whereas 目的語 marks the thing that receives the action, and learners often mix up which noun phrase plays which role.
Compound of 目的 (mokuteki, 'purpose, objective') and 語 (go, 'word, language'), likely a calque from Western grammatical terminology.