Sore

How to spell sore

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sore

What does sore mean?

1. adjectivePainful or aching, especially from injury, overuse, or illness.
2. nounA raw, painful, or inflamed patch of skin or tissue.

Sore in a sentence

• adjective

  After the long hike her legs felt sore for two days.

• noun

  The ill-fitting shoe rubbed a sore on her heel.

• adjective

  A sore throat is often the first sign of a cold.

• noun

  The nurse cleaned the sore before applying a fresh dressing.

Where does sore come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Sore descends from the Old English adjective and noun 'sar', which meant bodily pain, a wound, or grief, and it is one of the genuinely old native words of English rather than a later borrowing. The same Germanic root produced the German 'sehr', which once meant 'painfully' but now simply means 'very', a shift that mirrors how English once used 'sore' to mean 'severely' (as in 'sore afraid'). Over the centuries the word narrowed mostly to physical aching and to the noun for a raw or inflamed spot on the body. A useful spelling note is that sore is a homophone of 'soar', the verb for flying high; both end in the same sound, but only 'sore' carries the older Germanic '-ore' spelling tied to pain. The lingering sense of grievance, as in being 'sore' about a loss, is a direct survival of the original idea of emotional hurt.

How the word is built

• sore (from Old English sar: bodily pain, suffering); a single unanalysable root word with no prefix or suffix

Words that sound like sore

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

• soar: To fly or rise high into the air, or to increase rapidly in amount or intensity.