wore
- 1Past tense of wear.
He wore a heavy coat against the bitter wind.
By December the mountains wore a thick blanket of snow.
Note
One past form serves every meaning of wear: he wore a coat, she wore a frown, the river wore a channel through the rock. It can also act like a linking verb before an adjective, as in the carpet wore thin or the joke wore stale, to describe slow decline. After have or had, standard English switches to worn, unlike the nonstandard participle, which keeps wore there.
- 2Past participle of wear (nonstandard; the standard form is worn).
She had wore that necklace every day since the wedding.
They've wore the path down to bare dirt by walking it so often.
Note
Wore after have was once at home in print. Elkanah Settle's The Empress of Morocco (1673) has a head that "should the Morocco-Crown have wore", and Tobias Smollett writes that great wits "have wore the habit of an abbé". Today the form lives in casual speech and reads as nonstandard. In careful writing, use worn after any form of have: she had worn that necklace.
- 3Past tense of ware.
The helmsman wore the schooner onto the opposite tack.
Unable to tack in the heavy sea, they wore the brig instead.
Note
A sailor's verb: to ware a ship is to turn her stern through the wind onto the other tack. In tacking, by contrast, the bow crosses the wind, and crews wear ship when the sea is too heavy for that. Ware is only another spelling of this nautical wear, so its past is wore either way. The obsolete ware meaning "be wary" is a different verb.
wore is a form of wear
wear, verb: To have clothing, jewelry, equipment or similar on the body, at a given time or habitually; also, to have the hair or beard in a particular style. Full entry
- Spelling
- wear → wore: irregular (no -ed)
Practice
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