First opened Sunday, March 30, 2008
持ち上げる
もちあげる
- 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).
to raise, to lift up, to flatter
Mochiageru is mochi, the stem of 持つ (motsu, “to hold”), plus 上げる (ageru, “to raise, to lift”).
Taken apart
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In a sentence
彼は板の片端を持ち上げた。
He upped one end of the plank.
彼は持ち上げられなかった。
He couldn't lift.
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.
- “持(も)ち (mochi, 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 持(も)つ (motsu, “to hold”)) + 上(あ)げる (ageru, “to raise, to lift”)”
Source: Wiktionary: 持ち上げる (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
- 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.