First opened Tuesday, March 29, 2011
どうも
どうも
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.
Thank you; somehow; no matter how hard one may try
Dōmo is どう (dō, “how”) plus も (mo, “ever, even, also”): close in meaning to “no matter how”.
Taken apart
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In a sentence
どうも失礼。
I'm sorry.
本当にどうも。
Many thanks.
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.
- “Derived as compound of どう (dō, “how”, question word) + も (mo, “ever, even, also”, particle). Literal meaning is close to “no matter how, howsoever, in all cases”. Idiomatically and semantically used as an intensifier in specific contexts. Compare とても (totemo, “very”).”
Source: Wiktionary: どうも (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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.