Home → Irregular verbs → bear

Past tense of “bear”

🏋️ To carry something; to accept something difficult.

Number 123 of 175 by frequency, so one of the rarer ones: three forms that share almost nothing. You will meet it in books and set phrases more than in conversation, and it can wait.

Mistakes people make with “bear”

Not “beared”. Bear does not take -ed — the past simple is bore, however regular it feels to add the ending.

Not “have bore”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have borne, never I have bore. This one survives into quite advanced English, so it is worth over-learning.

Do not confuse it with…

Two participles, two meanings. Born is only for birth: she was born in May. Everything else takes borne: the costs were borne by the company.

British and American English

Born is reserved for birth; every other meaning takes borne. This is not a regional split — both varieties keep the two apart.

Phrases you will actually hear

These are worth learning whole. A verb sticks far better inside a phrase somebody would really say than on its own in a table.

No pattern to lean on

bear · bore · borne — three words that share almost nothing. There is no rule hiding here and no family to learn it with. These are the handful of verbs English uses most heavily, and heavy use is exactly what let them stay strange while everything around them regularised.

Which means: memorise all three, and memorise which is which. Bore stands alone — She bore the pain without a word. Borne never does; it needs have, has, had or a passive be — He has borne the responsibility for years.

The same pattern — free spirits — runs through 5 verbs: