Door is one of the busiest prepositions in Dutch, and its jobs barely overlap with any single English word. It means through (moving across a space), because of / by (a cause), and — most importantly for grammar — it marks the agent in a passive sentence: the person or force by whom something is done. On top of that, door … te builds "by …ing" clauses. This page sorts the senses out and nails the one rule that English speakers most often get wrong: the passive agent in Dutch is door, full stop — never bij, never van.
Sense 1: through (motion across a space)
The literal, spatial door is "through": through a city, a forest, a door, a tunnel. The thing moves into one side and out the other, or moves across the interior of a space.
We liepen 's avonds door de oude binnenstad.
In the evening we walked through the old city centre.
De trein rijdt door een lange tunnel onder de rivier.
The train runs through a long tunnel under the river.
De wind blies door de open ramen naar binnen.
The wind blew in through the open windows.
A useful contrast for English speakers: where English "through" sometimes shades into duration ("all through the night"), Dutch keeps the spatial door for space and uses other words for time. Door here is firmly about a path across a space — you go in one side and come out the other.
Het licht scheen door de gordijnen heen.
The light shone through the curtains.
Sense 2: because of / by means of (cause)
Door also marks a cause — the reason something happened. Here it answers "because of what?" and covers both impersonal causes (the rain, the storm) and, in casual speech, a person's doing (door jou = "because of you / thanks to you").
| Dutch | English |
|---|---|
| door de regen | because of the rain |
| door de file | because of the traffic jam |
| door jou | because of you / thanks to you |
| door een misverstand | due to a misunderstanding |
Door de regen is de wedstrijd afgelast.
Because of the rain, the match has been cancelled.
Door jou hebben we de trein gemist!
Because of you we missed the train!
Door een misverstand stonden we op het verkeerde perron.
Due to a misunderstanding, we were standing on the wrong platform.
Sense 3: the passive agent — the rule that matters
This is the heart of the page. In a passive sentence, the agent — the person or thing actually doing the action — is introduced by door in Dutch. The passive itself is built with worden (present/future) or zijn (perfect) plus a past participle, and the agent rides in on door:
worden / zijn + … + past participle + door + agent
English uses "by" here ("written by Mulisch"), and that's fine — but the error is reaching for the Dutch words that look like "by," namely bij or van. Neither works. The passive agent is always door.
Het boek is geschreven door Harry Mulisch.
The book was written by Harry Mulisch.
De brug wordt op dit moment gerepareerd door de gemeente.
The bridge is currently being repaired by the city council.
Onze hond is gevonden door een aardige buurvrouw.
Our dog was found by a kind neighbour.
Dit schilderij werd in 1889 geschilderd door Van Gogh.
This painting was painted in 1889 by Van Gogh.
Why door and not bij or van? Because the agent is the cause of the action — and door is precisely the cause-marker (sense 2). The passive agent is just the cause-sense applied to a person who acts. Bij means "near / at," van means "of / from" (possession, origin) — neither has anything to do with agency. The logic holds together once you see the passive agent as a special case of door = cause.
door … te — "by …ing"
Finally, door heads a non-finite clause with te + infinitive to mean "by doing something" — the means. This mirrors sense 2 (cause/means) but spreads it over a whole clause. The infinitive goes to the end, and English's gerund ("by practising") becomes door … te oefenen.
Door elke dag te oefenen werd haar Nederlands snel beter.
By practising every day, her Dutch quickly got better.
Je kunt veel geld besparen door zelf te koken.
You can save a lot of money by cooking yourself.
The classic mistake here is copying the English gerund and dropping the te (door oefenen). Dutch needs it: door te oefenen. (The full prep + te + infinitive system has its own page.)
Quick sense map
| Sense | Example | English |
|---|---|---|
| through (space) | door het bos | through the forest |
| because of (cause) | door de regen | because of the rain |
| passive agent | geschreven door X | written by X |
| by …ing (means) | door te oefenen | by practising |
Common Mistakes
❌ Het boek is geschreven bij Mulisch.
Incorrect — the passive agent is 'door', never 'bij': 'geschreven door Mulisch'.
✅ Het boek is geschreven door Mulisch.
The book was written by Mulisch.
❌ De brug wordt gerepareerd van de gemeente.
Incorrect — agent takes 'door', not 'van' (which would mean 'of/belonging to').
✅ De brug wordt gerepareerd door de gemeente.
The bridge is being repaired by the city council.
❌ Door oefenen werd haar Nederlands beter.
Incorrect — 'by …ing' needs 'te': 'door te oefenen'.
✅ Door te oefenen werd haar Nederlands beter.
By practising, her Dutch got better.
❌ We liepen bij het bos.
Incorrect — 'through the forest' is 'door het bos'; 'bij het bos' means 'near the forest'.
✅ We liepen door het bos.
We walked through the forest.
❌ De wedstrijd is afgelast bij de regen.
Incorrect — 'because of the rain' is 'door de regen' (or 'vanwege'), not 'bij'.
✅ De wedstrijd is afgelast door de regen.
The match was cancelled because of the rain.
Key Takeaways
- door = through (space), because of / by means of (cause), the passive agent, and heads door … te ("by …ing").
- The passive agent is always door — never bij, never van. It's the cause-sense of door applied to a person who acts.
- For "because of," door signals a direct cause; vanwege signals a circumstance taken into account.
- door … te + infinitive = "by …ing"; keep the te (door te oefenen, not door oefenen).
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Start learning Dutch→Related Topics
- Dutch Prepositions: OverviewA1 — The big picture before the details: Dutch prepositions are largely idiomatic and almost never map one-to-one onto English, one Dutch preposition often covers several English ones (and vice versa), many verbs lock onto a fixed preposition (wachten op, denken aan), and a preposition plus er fuses into erop / eraan. Why word-for-word translation from English fails.
- Prepositions with Infinitives: om te, door te, zonder te, na teB2 — Dutch builds whole subordinate clauses out of a preposition plus te plus an infinitive — om te (in order to), door te (by …ing), zonder te (without …ing), na te (after …ing) — and the infinitive always lands at the very end of the clause, a bracketing structure English has no exact equivalent for.
- The Passive with WordenB1 — How Dutch builds the dynamic, process passive with worden plus a past participle — De brief wordt geschreven — and why this 'something is being done' passive is grammatically separate from the resulting-state passive with zijn.
- Met: Accompaniment and InstrumentA1 — Met is Dutch's 'with' — but it stretches further than English 'with'. It marks accompaniment (met mijn vriend), instrument (met een mes), manner (met plezier) and, crucially, means of transport (met de trein, met de fiets) where English switches to 'by'. Two traps to master: transport takes met de + vehicle, and 'with it' is never met het but the fused form ermee.
- Uit vs Van: Out Of vs FromB1 — Two ways to say 'from' that English collapses into one: uit (out of an enclosed space, and the country/town you originate from — Ik kom uit Nederland, uit de kast) versus van (away from a point, a surface, or a person — van het station, van de tafel, van mijn moeder). Why your nationality is uit but the place you just left is van, and why surfaces split the two.