Other forms: bears, bearing
A bear is a large strong wild animal that sleeps through much of the winter. A brown bear, a polar bear, a bear in the woods.
There are eight species, and the polar bear is the largest land carnivore. In finance, a bear market is a falling one, against a bull market. There is a separate and very common verb bear, meaning to carry or to endure: bear the weight, bear the pain, cannot bear it. Note bear with me, meaning be patient; and bear in mind, which is one of the most-used phrases in English.
1nounbearA large strong wild animal that sleeps through winter.
“A polar bear can weigh about six hundred kilograms.”
2verbcarryTo carry or to endure.
“The old bridge can't bear the weight of heavy lorries.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Old English bera probably comes from a root meaning brown — a name-avoiding substitute for the animal's real name, which was taboo among northern peoples. Nobody in Germanic Europe would say the true word for bear, so the whole family calls it the brown one.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰerH-
Middle English
bere
English, today
bear
From Middle English bere. From Middle English bere, from Old English bera, from Proto-West Germanic berō, from Proto-Germanic berô (“bear”), from Proto-Indo-European bʰerH- (“brown”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA