[Beatrix]

is it possible to say that smbd is BORED BY smthg, or is it only bored WITH?

thanks in advance!

[susan53]

Hi Beatrix,

Both are certainly possible, and bored by comes more naturally to me. Looking at the examples rom the Cobuild concordancer I wonder if bored with is only used with concrete things, whereas both bored by and bored with are possible for both concrete and abstract ideas. But use the site to have a look at more examples to see if this holds up.

Bored by

... Well, ask me something he says, politely bored by the virtual-reality computer game smashing
... Indeed, many looked bored by the speeches and were impatient for the ..
latter is a military megalomaniac who is soon bored by the innocent toys the company produces,
...were shocked by the programme's ambition and bored by its technicalities.
In prison he had not been bored by solitude, but had often been irked by ...


Bored with

I'm bored with my bedroom. Over the past years it's
looked like this since I was a teenager and I'm bored with it
... at the age of 27, bored with my job as a small-change magazine
And I must admit, I was getting rather bored with lying on the sofa all day, eating ...
...an interesting man, `It was impossible to be bored with him!
she had known him he had challenged and become bored with skin-diving, mountain climbing ...
after sixteen years of marriage they have grown bored with each other. They may have fallen out of
... you'll probably be bored with life, and people will be bored with you.
...a dry man-of-the-world cynicism, as bored with left- wing enthusiasms as with religious ...

[ordeal]

Yes. e.g. He seemed faintly bored by the whole process.
He was bored with their conversation.
Source: Dictionary of Collocations.

[Beatrix]

thank you guys!

[STCrowley]

Just to cause trouble, I'll disagree!

I think that 'Bored by' is something immediate, something that the person is experiencing in that moment. (See the examples above.)

But 'bored with' can be more in general. I'm bored with my job. . . though it's Sunday and I'm not at work. It's more a general feeling of dissatisfaction.

In order to be bored 'by' my job, I think I'd have to be at work.
-Toby

[Beatrix]

Great, thanks Toby; sorry, I haven't noticed your answer before. I'll think about that.

[Denis DNT]

There is ...bored of, isn't there?

I am bored of teaching the same lessons over and over.

Does it make sense?

[STCrowley]

It makes sense to me. That's another 'general' meaning, in my book.

[Denis DNT]

On a funny note,
Once I taught my students the expression "... to death" usually added to verbs and adjectives.
It took me weeks to stop them from adding "to death" to other verbs and adjectives. They would say things like: sleep to death, eat to death, happy to death, sad to death, etc.
Then I introduced the adjective 'dead' before an adjective to correct their sentences to something like "I am dead hungry."
More confusion came in. They would just pick the weird adjectives: 'I am dead old, I am dead big, I am dead small, tall etc.
It's so difficult sometimes keeping them focused on what you want them to get.

[FionaVB]

Re Bored of: I hate this!
It seems to me that it's only become common in recent years, and I assumed it was a mistake caused by people simply equating "bored with" and "Sick of" or "Tired of". I'm too old to accept people changing perfectly adequate phrases for new ones with no useful change in nuance or meaning!