Boring

How to spell boring

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce boring

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does boring mean?

1. adjectiveSo dull or uninteresting that it fails to hold attention.
2. verbMaking a hole by drilling or piercing through a material.

Boring in a sentence

• adjective

  The training video was so boring that half the team stopped watching.

• verb

  The crew spent the morning boring through solid granite for the new tunnel.

• adjective

  She found the long commute boring until she started listening to podcasts.

• verb

  The dentist warned that boring into the tooth might cause brief discomfort.

Where does boring come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from the Old English verb 'borian', meaning 'to pierce' or 'to make a hole by drilling', which traces back to a Germanic root shared with words across northern Europe. The literal sense of cutting a hole came first, and it survives today when engineers talk of boring a tunnel or boring into rock. The figurative meaning, 'tediously dull', is surprisingly modern: it appeared only in the 1700s and 1800s, building on a sense of 'to bore' meaning to weary someone, perhaps from the mental image of something tediously drilling into your patience. Both meanings sit on the same single-r spelling, which is the trap, because the related word 'borrow' has a double r and writers sometimes carry that habit across. The simple memory aid is that 'boring' keeps just one r, exactly like the verb 'bore' it is built on.

How the word is built

• bore (Old English borian: to pierce)
• -ing (present participle / adjective suffix)