Rare

How to spell rare

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce rare

What does rare mean?

1. adjectiveNot occurring or found very often; uncommon or scarce.
2. adjectiveOf meat, cooked only briefly so that the inside remains red and juicy.

Rare in a sentence

• A total solar eclipse is a rare event in any one location.

• He ordered his steak rare and sent it back when it arrived well done.

• The collector paid a fortune for a rare first edition of the novel.

• The chef seared the beef quickly to keep it rare in the centre.

Where does rare come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin rarus, which literally meant 'thin', 'loose', or 'widely spaced', describing things that were scattered rather than packed tightly together. From that physical sense of being spread out grew the idea of something occurring only seldom, since scarce things appear at wide intervals. English borrowed the word through Old French rare during the 1400s, settling on the modern meaning of 'uncommon' or 'seldom found'. The cookery sense, meat that is lightly cooked and still red inside, has a separate and tangled history: it traces back to an older English word 'rear', once used of softly cooked eggs, and only later merged in spelling with rare. Because the word is short and phonetic, the main spelling pitfall is the silent final 'e', which writers sometimes drop.

How the word is built

• rare (from Latin rarus: thin, sparse, scattered)