love-hate
/ˌlʌvˈheɪt/
love-hate adjective: of a relationship: involving feelings of both love and hate, often simultaneously.
Adjective
love-hate (not comparable)
- Of a relationship: involving feelings of both love and hate, often simultaneously.
- The krogan have had a love-hate relationship with varren for millennia, alternately fighting them for territory and embracing them as treasured companions.2008, BioWare, Mass Effect, Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →ISBN, →OCLC, PC, scene: Varren Codex entry
- I loathe reviews in which a critic claims to have love-hate feelings about a work of art. It’s a way of having no opinion at all. But I love and hate “Taipei.”2013 June 4, Dwight Garner, “A Literary Mind, Under the Spell of Drugs and a MacBook”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
Verb
love-hate (third-person singular simple present love-hates, present participle love-hating, simple past and past participle love-hated)
- To feel both love and hate (for someone or something), often simultaneously.
- […]Eric got to act out his resentment while also hating himself, really love-hating himself, and he got to do it while masquerading as a warrior for the less fortunate!2022, Jordan Castro, The Novelist, Catapult, →ISBN
Forms of love-hate
| Adjective | |
|---|---|
| alternative uncommon | love/hate |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | love-hates |
| present participle | love-hating |
| past participle | love-hated |
| past | love-hated |
Origin of love-hate
The adjective is a calque of German Liebe-Hass (now more commonly Hassliebe (“love-hate relationship”)), from Liebe (“love; relationship of love”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *lewbʰ- (“to love”)) + Hass (“hate; hatred”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *keh₂d- (“anger; hatred”)). The verb is derived from the adjective.
Words formed from love-hate
Words that rhyme with love-hate
48 more rhymesFewer rhymes
- mate
- late
- bate
- create
- date
- relate
- vibrate
- wait
- deflate
- fate
- migrate
- rebate
- rotate
- strait
- supererogate
- translocate
- await
- eight
- freight
- skate
- alternate
- collate
- debate
- inflate
- sedate
- update
- compensate
- delate
- dilate
- fixate
- grate
- Haight
- hate
- implicate
- innate
- intercalate
- locate
- mandate
- negate
- overweight
- pinnate
- quadrate
- tate
- vacate
- aerate
- calibrate
- castrate
- conflate
Questions about love-hate
- What does love-hate mean?
- Love-hate means of a relationship: involving feelings of both love and hate, often simultaneously.
- What part of speech is love-hate?
- Love-hate can be an adjective or a verb.
- How do you pronounce love-hate?
- Love-hate is pronounced /ˌlʌvˈheɪt/ (UK).
Words near love-hate in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: love-hate (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-love-hate.wav.
Cite this entry: “love-hate.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/love-hate. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.