Boredom Is Newer Than You Think
Boredom is the dull, restless feeling of having nothing interesting to do. The word is surprisingly modern — it does not appear in English until the nineteenth century.
Boredom is the state of being bored: weary, restless and unengaged. The feeling is presumably as old as humanity, but the noun is not. It first appears in print in the 1850s, and Dickens is among the earliest writers to use it.
- The state of being bored. *He fidgeted with boredom.*
- The quality of being dull. *The sheer boredom of the task.*
- A long empty stretch. *Weeks of boredom broken by an hour of panic.*
Word forms
| Form | Word | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Noun | boredom | Relief from boredom. |
| Verb | bore | The lecture bored everyone. |
| Adjective | bored | I am bored. |
| Adjective | boring | A boring film. |
| Person | bore | He is a terrible bore. |
How it is used in a sentence
- She took up chess out of boredom.Out of boredom gives the motive.
- Boredom is not the same as tiredness.Uncountable, so no article.
- He ate the whole packet from sheer boredom.Sheer intensifies without adding meaning.
Bored, boring — a common mistake
- I am bored — describes how you feel
- I am boring — describes the effect you have on others
- The -ed form is the experience, the -ing form is the cause
- The same rule runs through interested and interesting, excited and exciting, confused and confusing
The verb *bore* in this sense appears in the eighteenth century with no clear ancestor — it is unrelated to boring a hole. *Boredom* was then built on it with the suffix *-dom*, the same ending as in kingdom and freedom, which turns a state into a noun.
Bored of or bored with?
Bored with and bored by are the traditional forms. Bored of is very common in speech and increasingly accepted in writing.
Is boredom countable?
No. Say a lot of boredom or moments of boredom rather than boredoms.