Borne

How to spell borne

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce borne

What does borne mean?

1. verbPast participle of 'bear': having carried, supported, or endured something.
2. adjectiveCarried or transmitted by a specified medium such as air, water, or insects.

Borne in a sentence

• verb

  She has borne the cost of the repairs entirely on her own.

• adjective

  The infection is borne by contaminated drinking water.

• verb

  The responsibility for the project was borne by the whole department.

• adjective

  These spores are borne on the wind for many miles.

Where does borne come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Borne is the past participle of the verb 'bear', which descends from the Old English beran, a thoroughly Germanic word meaning 'to carry', 'to bring forth', or 'to endure'. The same ancient root spread across the Germanic languages and even reaches back to a shared Indo-European source meaning 'to carry', a relative of the Latin ferre and the Greek pherein, both also meaning 'to bear'. For centuries the verb developed two past-participle spellings that English eventually split by meaning: 'born' became reserved for the idea of being brought into the world by birth, while 'borne' kept the older, broader sense of having carried, supported, or endured something. That deliberate division is exactly why the two are so easily muddled in writing; the silent 'e' in borne is the visual signal that you mean carried or sustained, not delivered at birth. The word also lives on inside compounds such as airborne and waterborne, where it preserves the literal idea of something being carried along.

How the word is built

• bear (Old English beran: to carry, bring forth, endure)
• past-participle ending -e

Words that sound like borne

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

• born: Brought into life by birth; existing as a result of being born.