First opened Tuesday, November 18, 2008
でも
でも
Pitch accent: We don't have the data for this section. No accent list gives this spelling and reading, or the two we check against disagree.
but, however
でも is で, the て-form of the copula だ/です, plus も (“even; too”).
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
でも高いよ。
It's expensive though.
でも素敵だわ。
Oh, but this is great.
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.
- “で (de, conjunctive ("て-form") of copula だ/です) + も (mo, “even; too”).”
- “When でも follows a noun, で is the conjunctive or "て-form" of the copula だ/です. で can also appear in the conjunctive form of certain classes of verbs; in that case, でも can be analyzed as the conjunctive form of the verb + the inclusive particle も, and means "even if"; compare with the allomorph ても used for different classes of verbs.”
Source: Wiktionary: でも (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.