bore

Usage Note: If an activity or experience starts to bore you, are you bored by it, bored of it, or bored with it? All three constructions are common in informal writing and speech, but they enjoy different degrees of acceptance. The most widely approved wordings are bored with and bored by. In our 2012 survey, the sentences I'm getting bored with this lecture series and I'm getting bored by this lecture series were accepted by 93 percent and 88 percent of our Usage Panel, respectively. By contrast, only 24 percent of the Panelists found I'm getting bored of this lecture series at least somewhat acceptable. Why is the bored of construction so widely condemned, when tired of, on which it is presumably modeled, is universally accepted? Probably because tired of was grandfathered into our language, as a relic of the once-common use of of in passive-voice constructions (in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, for instance, Benedict describes himself as being "loved of all ladies"—that is, loved by them). By the time bore came into English in the late 1800s, the use of of to indicate the agent in passive constructions was uncommon. People have kept using such pre-existent familiar phrasings as tired of and frightened of, but otherwise the passive-agent use of of is mostly defunct, so the phrasing bored of is likely to seem like an error to many readers.