First opened Monday, April 2, 2007
どう
どう
- 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).
how, in what way
Dō is first cited to 1604 in the Portuguese work Arte da Lingoa de Iapam.
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
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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.
- “First cited to 1604 in the Portuguese work Arte da Lingoa de Iapam.”
- Hedged“The initial ど (do) may be cognate with the interrogative ど (do) seen in どれ (dore), どこ (doko), どち (dochi).”
- Hedged“Alternatively, possibly from older form だう (dau), much like the shift from かう (kau) → こう (kō, “like this, this way”), or さう (sau) → そう (sō, “like that, that way”). This shift is apparently suggested in the Arte da Lingoa de Iapam entry of Dǒxô, presumably どうしよう (dō shiyō). However, the expected entries dǒ or dǒxô are missing from the 1603 Nippo Jisho.”
- “The kanji spelling is an example of jukujikun (熟(じゅく)字(じ)訓(くん)), using the corresponding Chinese term for the spelling and the underlying Japanese root word for the reading.”
Source: Wiktionary: どう (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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.