Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Uninteresting and tiresome; dull.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The act of piercing or perforating; specifically, in mining and similar operations, the act of making a hole in rock or earth by means of a borer or drill.
  • noun The hole made by boring.
  • noun plural The chips, fragments, or dust produced in boring. Also called boring-dust.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The act or process of one who, or that which, bores.
  • noun A hole made by boring.
  • noun The chips or fragments made by boring.
  • noun a revolving or stationary bar, carrying one or more cutting tools for dressing round holes.
  • noun (Metal Working) a cutting tool placed in a cutter head to dress round holes.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A pit or hole which has been bored.
  • verb Present participle of bore.
  • adjective That which incites boredom in a person.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective so lacking in interest as to cause mental weariness
  • noun the act of drilling a hole in the earth in the hope of producing petroleum
  • noun the act of drilling

Etymologies

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Examples

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  • Contronymic in the sense: incisive vs. dull.

    January 27, 2007

  • The town of Boring, Oregon: home of the Boring School, the Boring Church, the Boring Post Office, among other Boring things. (Actually it's quite a nice place!)

    November 14, 2007

  • Reminds me of Normal, Illinois. *pronounces Illinois as "eely nwah"*

    November 14, 2007

  • In the early 1990s a song that never failed to move me, that seemed to weld me to my life in its fullest, truest experience, was "Being Boring" by the Pet Shop Boys. I was intrigued by the central quotation from "the wife of a famous writer" and wondered exactly where it came from. I guessed that it must be from Zelda Fitzgerald, but never bothered finding the exact quote (finding such things was harder in those days). Now, today, I found a website devoted to the song: www.10yearsofbeingboring.com, and the quote itself, acknowledged as being from ZF, but without the specific reference, which I then easily found on Google Books:

    "… the Flapper … bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into battle. She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure; she covered her face with powder and paint because she didn’t need it and she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring. She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do."

    – Zelda Fitzgerald, "Eulogy on the Flapper" (1922), The Collected Writings (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).

    June 12, 2015