Boar

How to spell boar

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce boar

What does boar mean?

1. nounAn uncastrated male pig, or the tusked wild pig of forests and woodland.

Boar in a sentence

• The farmer kept one boar to breed with his sows.

• A wild boar with sharp tusks crossed the forest trail.

Where does boar come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes straight from Old English bār, the native Anglo-Saxon term for a male pig, and it has close cousins across the West Germanic languages, including the Old High German bēr. Its meaning has stayed remarkably stable for over a thousand years: it has always named the male of the swine family, whether the domestic kind kept for breeding or the tusked wild animal hunted in forests. The spelling is the chief trap, because the word sounds exactly like 'bore' (a dull person, or to drill) and 'Boer' (a South African farmer). The 'oa' vowel here is the giveaway, mirroring the same pattern in other animal-related earthy words. Because it is an ancient native word rather than a later borrowing, it carries no Latin or French baggage, just a long unbroken line back to early English farming life.

How the word is built

• boar (whole word from Old English bār: male pig; no affixes)

Words that sound like boar

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

• bore: To make someone feel tired and uninterested through dullness.