Ear

How to spell ear

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce ear

What does ear mean?

1. nounThe organ on either side of the head used for hearing and balance.
2. nounThe seed-bearing head or spike of a cereal plant such as corn or wheat.

Ear in a sentence

• The cold wind made her left ear ache.

• She boiled a single ear of corn for dinner.

• He whispered the address into my ear so no one else heard.

• Each ear of wheat in the field had ripened to gold.

Where does ear come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from the Old English eare, meaning the organ of hearing, and it traces back to a shared Germanic root that gave Dutch oor and German Ohr. Beyond the Germanic family, it connects to the Latin auris and the Greek ous, both also meaning the ear, all descending from an ancient Indo-European root for hearing. The grain sense of the word is actually a separate Old English word, ear, related to the idea of the ripe spike of corn, and the two simply fell together into one spelling over time. The familiar relatives 'aural' and 'auricle' come from the Latin branch rather than the native English one, which is why they look so different from the plain word ear. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable for over a thousand years, and its main trap today is the ea vowel pair, which sounds nothing like its spelling.

How the word is built

• ear (single root word from Old English eare; no prefix or suffix)