What's the difference between overbear and overwear?
Overbear
Definition:
(v. t.) To bear down or carry down, as by excess of weight, power, force, etc.; to overcome; to suppress.
(v. t.) To domineer over; to overcome by insolence.
(v. i.) To bear fruit or offspring to excess; to be too prolific.
Example Sentences:
(1) Her childhood - split between a boisterous outdoorsiness and an intense inner life - was dominated by her overbearing mother, with whom she fought "steadily but reluctantly" until her death.
(2) "[In the] last farm bill debate in 2008, Rep Earl Blumenauer heroically tried to force a vote on food aid reform, but was quashed by an overbearing rules committee, which wouldn't permit him to offer the amendment.
(3) The ditziness, the choice between the good man and the bad boy (Darcy and Cleaver), the overbearing parents all seemed infantilising.
(4) But the British institutions can still provide obstacles to overbearing Prime Ministers.
(5) It's about a child star and his overbearing parents and his agent and the studio, lawyers, therapists, everything.
(6) "Transplanting the Pirates Of The Caribbean aesthetic to the Wild Wild West proves disastrous in The Lone Ranger, an indigestible swill of forced humour and oversized, overbearing action sequences," he writes.
(7) "The state remains as bloated, overbearing and inefficient as ever.
(8) The heroic supposition appears to be that an overbearing state is somehow suppressing entrepreneurial spirit in areas such as the north-east, and that private enterprise will naturally burst forth once the public sector is cut down to size.
(9) The atmosphere inside the grounds has been good, even if Fifa's corporatism can be overbearing.
(10) Scotland would be a counterweight to London's huge, overbearing influence over the British economy.
(11) He never got on with his overbearing mother, Rosalind, but idealised his father Edward, who, as captain of the former passenger steamer Rawalpindi, had gone down with his ship and 263 men after the attack by the German battle cruiser Scharnhorst in November 1939.
(12) The alternative is that they'll be exactly like their online personas – overbearing and needy and desperate to react to everything with a tedious one-liner.
(13) Overbearing, ostentatious, and incongruous, don't you think?"
(14) To the authorities in Zug and Zurich, Rich was a victim of an overbearing US prosecutorial system - a system that had overreached itself in trying to have him extradited from Switzerland.
(15) Lyrically it is a bit overbearing, and there’s no mention of food or vodka, which is a bit strange.
(16) He wants recognition and respect from the international community, just as he wanted it (and probably did not get it) from his overbearing father and dysfunctional mafia family.
(17) Part of Manning's motivation, the defence has argued, was that he believed the US government to be overbearingly secretive, but again the prosecutors contend that is irrelevant to the question of his guilt or innocence.
(18) I found Mr Mitchell’s tone overbearing, but he did not swear at us.
(19) McKillop tried to defend his own tenure on the board, insisting Goodwin had not been overbearing and that the ABN deal was agreed by the entire board.
(20) In Out Of Place (1999), the memoir of his childhood and youth, Said described his father, who called himself William to emphasise his adopted American identity, as overbearing and uncommunicative.
Overwear
Definition:
(v. t.) To wear too much; to wear out.
Example Sentences:
(1) Avoidable causes are exaggerated tightness, overwearing, storing up of proteins, rough surface, and incompatibility of soft-lens solutions.
(2) Practitioners prefer soft lenses because they are less likely than hard lenses to cause epithelial staining, corneal molding, corneal edema, corneal desensitivity, or lens overwear syndrome.