Other forms: spared, spares, sparing
To spare someone is to choose not to hurt them when you could. The judge spares the boy prison; the storm spares one house on the street and flattens the rest. You also spare what you can do without: a pound for the busker, ten minutes for a phone call.
Spare is an adjective as much as a verb — a spare key under the flowerpot, the spare room, spare time, the spare wheel in the boot. Anything spare is held back until it is needed. On its own, to spare means left over: we got there with twenty minutes to spare. There is a thinner, colder adjective too, used of rooms and writing: a spare little flat with a bed and one window, spare prose with no decoration. And the fixed phrases carry a lot of the word's weight — spare me the details, spare no expense, spare a thought for the postman in this heat.
1verbspareTo choose not to harm, punish or kill someone you have power over.~4%
“The judge spared him prison and gave him community service.”
2verbaffordTo give or allow something you are able to do without — time, money, attention.~18%
“Could you spare ten minutes to look at my essay?”
synonyms: afford
3verbsaveTo save someone from having to go through something unpleasant.~2%
“I took the earlier train to spare her the wait.”
4adjectiveuseExtra, kept back and not in use; free for whenever it is needed.~72%
“There is a spare key under the flowerpot.”
5adjectiveplainPlain and bare, with nothing added.~2%
“The room was spare: a bed, a chair, one window.”
6nouncaseAn extra one kept in case the first fails, especially a spare wheel.~2%
“We changed the wheel and found the spare was flat too.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 22 sentences found in the wild and placed 21 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Spare goes back to Old English spær, sparing or scant, from Proto-Germanic *sparaz and a Proto-Indo-European root that also gave Latin prosperus, lucky. The oldest sense is about going without, having little — which is why one word covers a bare room and the coins you can afford to hand over.
Proto-Indo-European
*sph₁rós
Proto-Germanic
*sparaz
Old English
spær — sparing, scant
Middle English
spare
English, today
spare
From Middle English spare, spar, from Old English spær (“sparing, scant”), from Proto-Germanic sparaz, from Proto-Indo-European sph₁rós, from the root speh₁-. Compare Dutch spaarzaam, German sparsam and spärlich, Swedish sparsam, Icelandic sparr (“sparing”); also Latin prosperus (“lucky”), cu споръ (“plentiful”), Albanian shperr (“earn money”), Persian سپار (“entrust; deposit”), Ancient Greek σπαρνός (“rare”), Sanskrit स्फिर (“thick”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA