Lending and borrowing: emprestar vs. pegar emprestado

Lending and borrowing come up often — a pen, a charger, a car, twenty reais until Friday. Choosing the construction and preposition helps make clear who lends and who receives or requests the loan. Emprestado also changes its ending to match the thing borrowed. Learn both the direction and the agreement to make these everyday requests clear.

1. Lending and borrowing use different constructions

English hands you two tidy verbs and lets you pick: lend (the thing leaves you) and borrow (the thing comes to you). Here we compare a Portuguese verb with a phrase.

Emprestar a/para means lend. For receiving or requesting a loan, the clear constructions here combine pegar, pedir or tomar with emprestado (“lent / borrowed”). Portuguese also has regional or colloquial emprestar de meaning “borrow”, and tomar can mean “borrow” in context; it is not true that the language has no single verb for it.

So the sentence you need depends on which end of the deal you are standing on:

Common Pitfalls

• Confusing the direction. In the usual “lend” reading, ❌ Eu emprestei o carro dele says you lent his car out, and ❌ Eu emprestei o carro para ele says you lent him the car; neither expresses the intended borrowing here. ✅ Eu peguei o carro dele emprestado. (I borrowed his car.) Regional emprestar de has a different use, described below.

• Forgetting the agreement. ❌ Peguei a bicicleta emprestado. → ✅ Peguei a bicicleta emprestada. (I borrowed the bicycle.) The ending follows the object, always.

• Agreeing with the borrower instead. A woman still says ✅ Peguei o livro emprestado. (I borrowed the book.) Livro is masculine; emprestada would fail to agree with that noun in this construction.

• The wrong preposition after pegar emprestado. ❌ Peguei o carro emprestado para o meu irmão means you borrowed the car for your brother, to hand it to him. ✅ Peguei o carro emprestado do meu irmão. (I borrowed the car from my brother.)

• Leaving the loan implicit. Emprestado makes the loan explicit and can move: Peguei emprestado o livro and Peguei o livro emprestado (both: I borrowed the book). Peguei o livro do João says you took João’s book; context may imply a loan, but the sentence alone says nothing about permission.

• Treating tomar emprestado as written only. It can sound more formal than pegar emprestado, but both occur in conversation. ✅ Peguei emprestado (I borrowed it) is a common everyday choice; tomei emprestado is not banned from speech.

• Recognising regional emprestar de. Some Brazilians say Emprestei um livro do meu amigo for “I borrowed a book from my friend”; dictionaries record this regional or colloquial use. For a clear general-purpose borrowing construction, especially in formal writing, prefer peguei emprestado.