Pore - pour - paw

The homophones pore and pour (and sometimes paw and poor) are not infrequently confused. All are pronounced 'pawe', IPA: /pɔː/.

• To pour is probably the commoner verb. It is used of liquids, and means 'to make something flow [out of]'. Transitively, one can pour tea from a teapot, or milk from a milk bottle, etc; intransitively, water can pour out of a burst pipe, or the rain can pour down. Figuratively, the word can be applied to ideas, words and so on: "ideas came pouring out of his mouth". However, if you use pour when you mean pore when talking about a book, for example, you should properly be referring to an accident with a cup of coffee, or a similar mishap.
• The verb to pore (usually over something) means 'to read it with care, or look at it very closely'.
  • (There is also an unrelated noun, a pore, which means the little openings in skin or similar natural organs. One sweats through one's pores; a plant breathes through the pores in its leaves.)
• To confuse either of these with the noun and verb paw
  • as a noun, 'an animal's foot';
  • as a verb, 'to touch as a cat does with its paws'

would be a different sort of error, a case of the intrusive 'r'. Another common error is dealt with at Paws - pause.

• The adjective poor, often used substantively as in Mark ch. 14 v.7 "For ye have the poor with you always" is pronounced differently by different speakers. Increasingly the younger generation realize it as a homophone of 'paw' (IPA: /pɔː^r/ (about 82% of speakers born after 1973, in LPD's 1998 survey of British speakers), where about half of their parents' generation realized it as 'poo^er', /puː^r/.