Bore

How to spell bore

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bore

What does bore mean?

1. verbTo make someone feel tired and uninterested through dullness.
2. verbTo make a hole in something by drilling or cutting.
3. nounA person or activity that is tiresome and uninteresting.
4. verbThe past tense of 'bear', meaning carried, supported, or endured.

Bore in a sentence

• verb

  Long meetings with no agenda tend to bore the whole team.

• verb

  Engineers had to bore deep into the rock to lay the pipeline.

• noun

  Everyone avoided him at parties because he was such a bore.

• verb

  The old bridge bore the weight of the trucks for decades.

• verb

  The lecturer worried that endless statistics would bore his audience.

• verb

  The dentist used a fine tool to bore into the decayed tooth.

Where does bore come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This spelling actually covers several different histories that happened to collapse into the same four letters. The drilling sense comes from the Old English verb borian, meaning 'to pierce or perforate', which is related to the Latin forare 'to bore' and to a wide family of Germanic words for making holes. The sense of wearying someone first appears in English around the middle of the 1700s, and its origin is genuinely uncertain; lexicographers cannot trace it confidently to any earlier root, which is why it seems to arrive from nowhere. Quite separately, 'bore' is also the old past tense of 'bear', from Old English beran 'to carry or endure'. The tidal sense, a surge of water sweeping up a river, is probably from Old Norse bara meaning 'a wave or billow'. Because of all this overlap, the trap for a writer is the homophone 'boar' (the wild pig), which sounds identical but keeps the older -oar spelling.

How the word is built

• bore (from Old English borian: to pierce or to bear), a single root word with no affixes

Words that sound like bore

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

• boar: An uncastrated male pig, or the tusked wild pig of forests and woodland.