Wore

How to spell wore

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce wore

What does wore mean?

1. verbThe past tense of 'wear': to have had clothing, jewellery, or an expression on the body at an earlier time.

Wore in a sentence

• She wore a navy suit to the interview yesterday.

• He wore a watch on his left wrist for thirty years.

Where does wore come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Wore is the past tense of the verb 'wear', which comes from the Old English werian, meaning 'to clothe, to put on, or to cover the body'. That verb belonged to a wider Germanic family, with relatives in Old High German werien and Gothic wasjan, all carrying the idea of dressing or covering oneself. Like many old, very common English verbs, 'wear' never adopted the regular '-ed' past tense; instead it kept an ancient pattern in which the vowel itself changes, giving us 'wore' for the past and 'worn' for the participle. This vowel-shifting habit, called ablaut, is the same process that turns 'sing' into 'sang' and 'sung'. The spelling trap is purely in the sound: in many accents 'wore' is identical to 'war', so the silent reminder is that it shares its 'w' and its 'r' with the verb 'wear' it descends from.

How the word is built

• wore (the past tense of wear, an irregular vowel change from Old English werian)

Words that sound like wore

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

• war: A state of armed conflict between nations, states, or groups.