Spelfabet

18 thoughts on “ear as in bear”

1. Addison December 2, 2019 at 9:49 am

   There is only 6 words ?

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   1. alison Post authorDecember 12, 2019 at 12:19 pm

      Only five base words, really: bear, pear, swear, tear, wear, and then words built from them like bearable and menswear and pearshaped.

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2. eva November 10, 2020 at 9:56 pm

   I bet I can think of more words than just six.

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   1. alison Post authorNovember 12, 2020 at 7:10 pm

      Yes, there are a lot more but as far as I know they are all derived from these words e.g. pearshaped, bearable, unbearable, swearing, wearing, tearing, underwear.

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3. eva November 10, 2020 at 10:00 pm

   normally Spelfabet has so many words that I haven’t thought of and I don’t even know. There are barely any words and they’re so simple surely there are more.

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   1. alison Post authorNovember 12, 2020 at 7:13 pm

      There are a lot more words with the SPELLING “ear” but not ones that sound like “air”. There are four ways to pronounce “ear”: as in hear, learn, bear and heart. This is the second-least common (heart and hearth are the least common).

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4. Grace November 24, 2020 at 4:56 pm

   Ummmmmmmmm this is not what I expected you’d think a professional website (dictionary) could think up more words than just 6. Build of these words people! ING ED ABLE UN add these on it’ll help trust me!

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   1. alison Post authorNovember 25, 2020 at 10:52 am

      There really are only five base words with this phoneme-grapheme correspondence. I’m thinking about how to provide wordlists that account for morphology but I’m not keen to clutter up the wordlists with every possible affixed form. If you want word families, you can use a site like morewords, just google “morewords contains bear” and all the words which contain this letter sequence will come up.

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5. Graham Canfield February 16, 2021 at 6:09 am

   No challenging words really!?!?!?!?!

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   1. alison Post authorFebruary 25, 2021 at 1:58 pm

      This is a low-frequency phoneme-grapheme correspondence, there are some compounds and affixed versions of these words, though, such as unbearable and pearshaped. If you go to morewords and search for the base words you should get a list of all the other words with the same letter sequence, though they don’t control for phoneme-grapheme correspondence.

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6. Michelle April 29, 2021 at 8:01 am

   Thank you! Interesting that there are so few ‘ear as in bear’ base words. I hadn’t realised!

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7. Leila October 5, 2021 at 10:56 am

   There are more comments than words!
   This is unbelievable!

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   1. alison Post authorOctober 6, 2021 at 12:53 pm

      Why is it unbelievable? This is a low-frequency spelling, there are only five words plus their compounded and affixed forms, as far as I know.

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      1. LeBron James October 11, 2021 at 12:25 pm

         No, but we DO want those compounded and affixed words.

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         1. alison Post authorOctober 11, 2021 at 2:54 pm

            Hi LeBron, sorry, my lists don’t include all the affixed forms, I’m really just trying to cover all the lemmas. If you want the affixed forms you can use a website like Morewords to find them, for example here are all the words containing “bear” https://www.morewords.com/contains/bear

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8. JW January 13, 2022 at 10:11 am

   What you are doing here makes sense Alison – can’t believe how ungrateful some of these commenters are. Clearly not interested in doing the work themselves, yet expect you to do it for them for free like it is your duty.

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   1. alison Post authorJanuary 13, 2022 at 5:46 pm

      Ah well, there are a lot worse things on the internet, so I’m not worrying about them, but thanks for your concern. Alison

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   2. Mrs H January 22, 2022 at 5:29 am

      Echo this – I find your site so helpful. Thanks always!

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