Bear With Me or Bare With Me–Which Is Right?

“Bear With Me” or “Bare With Me”?

Updated on April 11, 2023Grammar

The internet is full of incorrect spellings of homophones in expressions such as bear with me (vs. bare with me). The verb bare means “to reveal” or “to uncover.” When you’re asking someone to bear with you, you’re asking them to be patient, or forbearing, with you, not to uncover themself with you.

The speaker asked the audience to bear with her while she searched for the correct graph.

Sorry, until I find the graph you will have to bare with me.

Here’s a tip: Want to make sure your writing shines? Grammarly can check your spelling and save you from grammar and punctuation mistakes. It even proofreads your text, so your work is extra polished wherever you write.

Your writing, at its best

Grammarly helps you communicate confidently

How to remember the spelling of bear with me

Are you still stumped? Here’s an easy way to differentiate bear from bare. You learned that bear as a verb means “to be patient.” In its noun form, bear refers to a large furry animal. Combining these two definitions into a silly sentence will help you remember that the correct phrase is bear with me, not bare with me: “A patient bear will always bear with you, but an impatient bear just might devour you!”

Examples of bear with me

Here are some online examples that use the phrase correctly:

Major League Baseball hasn’t missed any games since the doomsday season of 1994, when they—and bear with me here because I can never type this clause without needing to sit down and catch my breath afterward—canceled the World Series. —Will Leitch, Vulture

Please bear with me for the next few minutes because you are about to read the most self-indulgent column I have ever written—and as I’ve been writing these weekly Wednesday missives for the past 30-odd years, that’s really saying something. —Derek Burrows, Stuff

Now, I don’t use the word “ghosts” lightly, but bear with me; the river is a repository for all types, a downward-moving fugue subsuming all comers. —Leslie Jenike, The Rumpus

“Two and a half weeks in to learning how to play the piano,” [Channing Tatum] explains in a black-and-white video posted to his account. “Bear with me, this is going to be brutal.” —Time

Bare vs. bear

Bare and bear sound alike, so it’s easy to see why people confuse the two. Do you have them straight in your mind? Bare is a verb that means “to uncover.” The verb bear means “to endure” or “to be patient”; keep that in mind and the expression bear with me will make sense. What other homophones would you like to master today? How about starting with discrete and discreet?