Bare

How to spell bare

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bare

What does bare mean?

1. adjectiveNot covered, clothed, or decorated; exposed or empty.
2. verbTo uncover or reveal something that was hidden.

Bare in a sentence

• adjective

  He walked across the cold tiles in his bare feet.

• verb

  The dog began to bare its teeth at the stranger.

• adjective

  The cupboard was completely bare after the move.

• verb

  She did not want to bare her feelings to the whole office.

Where does bare come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English baer, meaning 'naked' or 'uncovered', which traces back to a shared Germanic ancestor that also gave German 'bar' and Old Norse 'berr', all carrying the same sense of being stripped of covering. It is one of the oldest layers of the English vocabulary, in use long before the Norman Conquest and never borrowed from another language. The verb sense, 'to lay bare' or 'to reveal', grew directly out of the adjective: to make something bare is to expose it. Its great spelling pitfall is that it sounds identical to the unrelated 'bear' (the animal, and the verb meaning to carry or to endure), which comes from a completely separate Old English root, beran. Keeping the two apart in writing is the whole challenge, since the shorter, simpler 'bare' is the one that means uncovered.

How the word is built

• bare (from Old English bær: naked, uncovered); a single root word with no affixes

Words that sound like bare

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• bear: To carry, support, or endure something, whether a weight, a cost, or a hardship.