First opened Friday, October 7, 2011
動向
どうこう
- flat (heiban)
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).
trend, tendency, movement, attitude
Dōkō is uncertain: first attested in 1929, it may be a borrowing from written Chinese, or a coinage from 動 (dō, “moving, movement”) plus 向 (kō, “facing, direction”).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
新聞は世の動向を左右する。
Newspapers influence the current of time.
日本の最新動向について報告したいと思います。
We would like to report about the latest trends in Japan.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- Hedged“Uncertain. First attested in Japanese in 1929. Might be a borrowing from written Chinese 動向, or possibly a coinage within Japanese of Middle Chinese-derived elements as a compound of 動 (dō, “moving, movement”) + 向 (kō, “facing, direction”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 動向 (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
- 漢語 Sino-Japanese
- Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.