·

4 Bear, pear, wear – how to pronounce “ea”

The most common pronunciation of “ea” in English is [iː], such as in bean, lead, clean, lean, read, or sea, but these words usually don't pose any problem to English learners, or so they think.

However, it's not so clear-cut for some of these words:

I read, but I have read. The past tense and past participle sounds the same as the word "red" (listen to the difference).

leant (a variant in British English) and leaned – the two possible past tenses of lean sound different.

You can lead a team, but the metal lead is not pronounced the same.

clean vs. cleanse – a very confusing one, considering how similar the meanings are s.

Bread with pears

The second most common pronunciation is [ɛ], as in head, dead, bread, breast or health. The ones I've just mentioned are OK for most people, but for some reason, there are a few words consistently causing problems:

bear, pear, wear, swear – the animal, the fruit, what we do with clothes, and what we do when a bear attacks. All of them are pronounced with the [ɛ]. In other words, if you've heard a story about someone's grandpa being attacked by a beer while eating his peer, you can be pretty sure the storyteller hadn't read this article.

It might be tempting to think that words ending with -ear are always pronounced like that, but they are often pronounced with [i] (US) or [ɪ] (UK).

tear, tear – this word may cause a lot of confusion because it has two completely unrelated meanings (click at both words and listen to the pronunciations). When it denotes a water drop coming out of someone's eye, it rhymes with “clear”. When it denotes the process of ripping something, it rhymes with “wear”.

clear – this one usually doesn't cause pronunciation issues, but did you know that it can be a verb, an adjective, an adverb, or even a noun? Check the dictionary by clicking on the word in the blue row.

smear – pronounced like “mere” with an added “s” at the beginning.

near – the same case as above.

The three greats

There are exactly three English words where “ea” is pronounced [eɪ]:

steak, break, great – pronounced exactly the same as “stake”, “brake”, and “grate”, respectively.

And a few anomalous pronunciations:

heart, hearth – in those two words, sometimes confused by learners in spelling, “ea” is pronounced as [ɑ].

...
This is not all! Sign up to see the rest of this text and become part of our exclusive community of language learners.
...

If it's been a pleasure to read this article, jump right to the next one.

A guided tour of commonly mispronounced words
1.Introduction
2.Words you should definitely know
3.Womb, tomb, comb
4.Bear, pear, wear
5.Calm, talk, half
6.Elite, grind, bull
7.Hour, honor, honest
8.Angelic, chocolate, draught
9.Genre, debt, soccer