Grammar Bite: Bored With or Bored Of?

I once received the following question from a reader: 

I have always taught that the correct preposition to use with “bored” is “bored with…” Recently, I’ve noticed more and more the usage of “bored of” something. Has the “of” become more acceptable in recent years, or have I been misleading students and clients all these years?

According to my research, bored of is becoming more common, but bored with is still the most common by far. With and by are the traditional prepositions, and so far are still more commonly used than bored of based on my research in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (1990–2019):

This Google Ngram shows that in books overall, bored by has been used less often in the last century, while bored of gained only a little and bored with gained quite a bit. Usages of each phrase appear to have increased around the turn of the 21st century:

Given the evidence, I would agree that bored of is still informal and unless an informal tone is wanted, I would change bored of to bored with.

A version of this article originally published in 2013 in Copyediting newsletter.