Bored

How to spell bored

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bored

What does bored mean?

1. adjectiveFeeling weary and restless because nothing is interesting or engaging.
2. verbPast tense of bore: made a hole by drilling or digging.

Bored in a sentence

• adjective

  The children grew bored during the long car journey.

• verb

  The engineer bored a narrow hole through the concrete wall.

• adjective

  He felt bored after an afternoon of repetitive paperwork.

• verb

  Workers bored deep into the rock to reach the water.

Where does bored come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past form of the verb 'bore', and the two main meanings actually descend from different sources that happened to fall together in spelling. The older sense, 'to drill a hole', comes from the Old English borian, meaning 'to pierce or perforate', a word with relatives across the Germanic languages and an ancient root meaning 'to cut or bore through'. The far more common modern sense, 'to weary someone', is a curiosity: it appears in English only in the mid 1700s, with no certain origin, which is why dictionaries still mark it as obscure. One popular guess links it to the drilling sense, as though a tedious person slowly bores a hole into your patience, but that is folk reasoning rather than proven fact. Whatever its source, the spelling keeps the silent finish that makes 'bored' sound exactly like 'board', the plank, which is the trap to watch.

How the word is built

• bore (Old English borian: to pierce, later to weary)
• -d (past-tense / past-participle ending)

Words that sound like bored

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

• board: A long, flat, thin piece of sawn wood.