Word.ws English Dictionary

bearish

bearish adjective: resembling or likened to a bear, typically in being rough, surly, or clumsy.

Adjective

bearish (comparative more bearish, superlative most bearish)

  1. Resembling or likened to a bear, typically in being rough, surly, or clumsy.
  2. Characterized by or expecting falling prices.
    • At the start of the year, Bridgewater turned bearish on U.S. bonds and built up a short position.2011 July 18, John Cassidy, “Mastering the Machine”, in The New Yorker, →ISSN
  3. (broadly) Pessimistic about the future.
    • The Germans were downcast because of Eastern Europe and Helmut Schmidt's decline, the Arabs were depressed because of oil and Iraq, the French were bearish because of their government; only the British seemed a little upbeat, but that was before the Falkland Islands incident.2014, Barton Biggs, Biggs on Finance, Economics, and the Stock Market: Barton's Market Chronicles from the Morgan Stanley Years, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN

Antonyms of bearish

Forms of bearish

comparativemore bearish
superlativemost bearish

Origin of bearish

From bear + -ish.

Words formed from bearish

Questions about bearish

What does bearish mean?
Bearish means resembling or likened to a bear, typically in being rough, surly, or clumsy.
What part of speech is bearish?
Bearish is an adjective.

Words near bearish in the dictionary

  1. bearing with
  2. bearing witness
  3. bearingless
  4. bearinglike
  5. bearings
  6. bearish
  7. bearishly
  8. bearishness
  9. bearkind
  10. bearleader
  11. bearleaders

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bearish (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-bearish.wav.

Cite this entry: “bearish.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bearish. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.