First opened Thursday, November 22, 2007
可愛がる
かわいがる
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.
to love, to be affectionate
Kawaigaru is 可愛い (kawaii, “cute, adorable”) plus がる (-garu, “feeling or thinking that way”).
Taken apart
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In a sentence
父も母に劣らず私をかわいがってくれた。
My father loved me no less deeply than my mother.
母親は往々にして子供をかわいがり過ぎる。
Mothers often pamper their children.
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 可愛い (kawaii, “cute, adorable”) + がる (-garu, “feeling or thinking that way”, suffix applied to nouns and adjective stems to create a verb).”
Source: Wiktionary: 可愛がる (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
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.