bear market
"bear-market" is a 10-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“bear market” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 11
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - A stock market where a majority of investors are selling ("bears"), causing overall stock prices to drop. Often operationally defined as a market value drop of 20% or more on some specific stock ma...
Corpus desk
Index EN-bear-market · bear market · English
bear market · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 11 letters
- VOW-4 4 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "B" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | bear market |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 11 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “bear market” in English
Rare enough to double-check
bear market is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.
Zero misspellings are on record for bear market in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. This entry stands alone in our confusable dataset, since nothing in our dataset looks or sounds close enough to cause mix-ups.
Wiktionary doesn't record an etymology for this headword, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is bear market, spelled B-E-A-R- -M-A-R-K-E-T.
Definition
- 1A stock market where a majority of investors are selling ("bears"), causing overall stock prices to drop. Often operationally defined as a market value drop of 20% or more on some specific stock market index.
- 2Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see bear, market.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how bear market appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Investors face a quandary. Cash offers a return of virtually zero in many developed countries; government-bond yields may have risen in recent weeks but they are still unattractive. Equities have suffered two big bear markets since 2000 and are wobbling again. It is hardly surprising that pension funds, insurers and endowments are searching for new source…
Now bids are submitted by button companies for the Teddy Bear contract, and Germany plush factories manufacture plush especially for the bear market at Giengen Brenz.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.