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].

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