Other forms: boring, bored, bores
To bore is to make a deep hole by turning or digging — a drill bit boring into a wall, engineers boring a tunnel through rock, a beetle boring into a beam. Round, deep, and cut by something that turns.
The other bore is the tiring one: to bore somebody is to drain their interest away, and a bore is the person who does it, or the chore that does it. Bored means feeling it and boring means causing it, and swapping the two (I am boring) is the classic slip. As a noun, the bore of a gun or a pipe is the width of the hole inside — a twelve-bore shotgun, a narrow-bore tube. And bore is also the past tense of bear: she bore three children, the wall bore the whole weight, which has nothing to do with holes or with dullness.
1verbboreTo make a deep round hole by drilling or digging.
“They bored through fifty metres of rock before they hit water.”
2verbloseTo make someone lose interest by being dull.
“The speaker bored the room for a solid hour.”
3nountediousA dull person, or a tedious thing that has to be done.
“Filling in the same forms every quarter is a bore.”
4nouninternalThe internal width of a tube, pipe or gun barrel.
“The rifle had a narrow bore and a long barrel.”
Old English borian meant to pierce, and the drilling sense has not shifted since. The cousins are in Latin — forō, to bore or pierce, and feriō, to strike or cut — and in Albanian birë, a hole. The dull sense came much later, and the best guess is a figure of speech about boring somebody's ears; German drillen makes the same jump from drilling to wearing a person down.
Old English
borian
Middle English
boren
English, today
bore
From Middle English boren, from Old English borian. From Middle English boren, from Old English borian (“to pierce”), from Proto-West Germanic borōn, from Proto-Germanic burōną. Compare Danish bore, Norwegian Bokmål bore, Dutch boren, German bohren, Old Norse bora. Cognate with Latin forō (“to bore, to pierce”), Latin feriō (“strike, cut”) and Albanian birë (“hole”). Sense of wearying may come from a figurative use such as "to bore the ears"; compare German drillen.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA