First opened Sunday, December 20, 2009
頑張る
がんばる
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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 try one's best, to try hard, to persist
“Do your best” once meant “be stubborn” — and the 頑 may belong to neither candidate origin.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
In a sentence
いいぞ。頑張れよ。
Sure. Good luck!
焦らずに頑張ってね。
Stay calm, and do your best.
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“Derivation uncertain. The two leading theories are:”
- “* Sense shift from 眼張る (ganbaru, “to keep watch on something, to stare at something”, literally “keep one's eye on something”)”
- “* Shift in pronunciation from 我に張る (ga ni haru, literally “to stick to one's desires, to insist on one's point of view”)”
- “The sense was originally to be stubborn, to be obstinate, with negative overtones. The modern positive sense of to persist, to endure has arisen since the end of the Edo period in 1868.”
- “The spelling is ateji (当(あ)て字(じ)), using the 頑 (gan) character to express a sense of stubborn. The historical kana spelling ぐわんばる (gwanbaru) comes from the use of this 頑 character, and is not related to either of the expected derivations above.”
- “Some sources use both 頑張る and 眼張る as spellings for the persist, endure sense. Other sources split these out as entirely separate entries.”
Source: Wiktionary: 頑張る (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
- 混種語 Hybrid
- Words that mix layers, e.g. a native part with a Chinese one.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Meaning shift
- The word's meaning moved away from where it started.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.