Skip to main content
PlainSpell

rare

/ɹɛɚ/adjective, noun, verb

rare is an adjective meaning “Very uncommon; scarce” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled R-A-R-E and has one syllable, and it appears 59 times per million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data).

What does rare mean?

adjective

  1. 1

    Very uncommon; scarce.

    Black pearls are very rare and therefore very valuable.

  2. 2

    Small in number (but not unusual); infrequent; sparse.

  3. 3

    Thin; of low density.

  4. 4

    UKslangGood; enjoyable.

    Sees her reflection in a butcher shop. She finds it all quite rare That her meat's all vanity fair.

  5. 5

    USslangCool; excellent.

    I whistled for a cab and when it came near / The license plate said ‘fresh’ and it had dice in the mirror. / If anything I could say that this cab was rare.

  6. 6

    Particularly of meat, especially beefsteak: cooked very lightly, so the meat is still red.

  7. 7

    obsoleteEarly.

noun

  1. 1

    A scarce or uncommon item.

verb

  1. 1

    USTo rear, rise up, start backwards.

  2. 2

    USTo rear, bring up, raise.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce rare?

  • UK /ɹɛə/
  • British /ɹɛː/
  • US /ɹɛɚ/

Rare has one syllable (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-us-rare.ogg, En-CA_Rare.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of rare

  • rarer comparative
  • rarest superlative
  • rares plural, present, singular, he/she/it
  • more rare comparative
  • most rare superlative
  • reer UK
  • rere UK
  • raring participle, present
  • rared participle, past

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is rare?

Rare appears 59 times per million words in written English, the 1,758th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Words people confuse with rare

Word pairs people search, with the monthly searches for “a vs b” (G: Google, B: Bing, United States).

rare vs rear0 B

Sources: Google and Bing searches (September 2025 to August 2026, through DataForSEO); English Wiktionary (homophones, alternative spellings).

How do you abbreviate rare?

Wiktionary records one abbreviation of rare: r..

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

Rare in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

LanguageWords
Frenchrare, peu commun (very uncommon), saignant (cooked very lightly)
Germanselten, rar (very uncommon), blutig, englisch (cooked very lightly), verdünnt (thin density gas)
Portugueseraro (very uncommon), malpassado (cooked very lightly), rarefeito (thin density gas)
Spanishraro, insólito, ralo, muy incomún (very uncommon), crudo, poco hecho (cooked very lightly)

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does rare come from?

From Middle English rare, from Old French rare, rere (“rare, uncommon”), from Latin rārus (“loose, spaced apart, thin, infrequent”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₁reh₁- (“friable, thin”).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).