Friday, 30 July 2004

Learn Your Homophones: Pear, Pair, and Pare

Pair: two of something, usually that are similar or go together. For example:

I’m going to buy a new pair of shoes.
Johnny and Sally make a cute pair.

Pear: a fruit. For example:

Rufus is eating an apple, and I am eating a pear.
The pear was ripe and juicy.

Pare: trim (something) by cutting away its outer edges; cut the skin off of something; reduce (something) in size, extent, quantity, or number, usually in a number of small successive stages. For example:

Each summer he pares a large number of branches from the trees in the backyard.
When making an apple pie, pare the skin off the apples first
.
They have significantly pared down the number of people on their team.

Now that you know the difference between these words see if this sentence makes sense to you:

Before I eat them, I will pare this pair of pears.

To learn more about confusing words, read this post about word pairs.

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