Vowel Trigraphs: ear

Often the same string of letters can be pronounced in many different ways.

For example:

The words bear, fear and search all have the letters ear in them, but the sound made by the letters is different in each word.

This table shows the main ways of pronouncing ear in English.

These pronunciations are based on Standard English. People have different accents depending on where they live, so you may pronounce some of the words a little differently.