Bear

How to spell bear

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bear

What does bear mean?

1. verbTo carry, support, or endure something, whether a weight, a cost, or a hardship.
2. nounA large, heavy mammal with thick fur, strong claws, and a short tail.

Bear in a sentence

• verb

  The older beams can no longer bear the weight of the roof.

• noun

  A brown bear wandered into the campsite looking for food.

• verb

  She had to bear the pain quietly until the medication arrived.

• noun

  The wildlife park keeps a polar bear in a climate-controlled enclosure.

Where does bear come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This spelling actually carries two old words that fell together. The animal sense comes from Old English bera, a Germanic word for the large forest mammal; many scholars think it began as a taboo nickname meaning roughly 'the brown one', because hunting peoples avoided speaking the beast's true name aloud. The verb sense, meaning to carry or to endure, comes from the Old English verb beran 'to bring, to carry, to bring forth', which traces back to the same ancient Indo-European root that gave Latin ferre and Greek pherein, both also meaning 'to carry'. That deep root is why English still says a tree 'bears' fruit and a woman 'bears' a child. The two meanings have been spelled alike since the Middle Ages, which is partly why bear and its sound-alike 'bare' are so easily muddled. The spelling trap is purely the homophone: bear (the animal or the verb) versus bare (uncovered).

How the word is built

• bear (single root; from Old English bera 'the animal' and beran 'to carry')

Words that sound like bear

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

• bare: Not covered, clothed, or decorated; exposed or empty.