English homophones
bare/bear
"bare" is an adjective; "bear" is a noun - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "bare" arrives as an adjective, while "bear" is a noun. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- No shared spelling stem: "bare" is 4 letters, "bear" is 4; only the sound ties them.
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across bare, bear: aber. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
bare
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCV
Inventory aber · no private letters vs siblings
bear
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVVC
Inventory aber · no private letters vs siblings
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "bare" when you mean: Minimal; that is or are just sufficient.
- Write "bear" when you mean: A large, generally omnivorous mammal (a few species are purely carnivorous or herbivorous), having shaggy fur, a very small tail, and fla…
Known mistypes of these spellings
Edit-distance variants recorded against this cluster: useful when a search or OCR feed lands on the wrong form.
Each spelling
Nearby English homophone groups
What to do next
You've reviewed the 2-spelling cluster (bare, bear). Here's where to go from here.
- "bear" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #1,985 in English). Full entry
- Among English homophone groups, a cluster of 2 spellings ranks #133 by size (1,007 groups in this vintage). Corpus statistics
- Explore a nearby 2-spelling cluster: bein · bene. Nearby cluster
- Grammar often disambiguates this cluster, match the meaning to the part of speech before picking a spelling. Pick by meaning
PlainSpell is a reference corpus, not spelling advice. Verify unusual forms in context.