One of the interesting challenges in English is that the language has words which are spelled differently because they have different meanings and etymologies, but which sound the same in the spoken language. Then, just to confuse things, English has words which are spelled and spoken the same, but which have different meanings and etymologies. Consider the following:
“While contemplating the situation of the poor, she pored over dusty tomes in the hot library with sweat streaming from her pores as she poured herself a cold drink.”
Poor:
The origins of the English “poor” can be traced back to the Old French “povre” which comes from the Latin “pauper.” Originally, the Latin “pauper” had a compound meaning formed from “paucus” meaning “little” and “parāre” meaning “to get.” Thus “pauper” had an original meaning of “getting little.”
“Poor” came into English about 1200 and replaced the Old English “earm.” It acquired the additional meaning of “inferior quality” about a century later.
In the sixteenth century, English acquired “pauper” directly from Latin and assigned to it the meaning of “poor person.” When it entered English about 1510, “pauper” was a legal word which indicated that a person was allowed to sue in court without legal fees.
Pore:
The word “pore” in English has two different meanings and etymologies. The oldest form of “pore,” meaning “to look attentively,” can be traced back to the Old English “*pūrian” which may also have been the origin of the word “peer.”
The more recent “pore” has an etymology going back to the Old French “pore,” the Latin “porus” and the Greek “póros” meaning “passage.” The Greek word appears to be a descendent of the Proto-Indo-European “*por-” meaning “going, passage.” The use of the word in the anatomical sense can be traced back to the Greek. The use of “pore” meaning “minute opening” can be traced back to the late fourteenth century.
Pour:
The word “pour” came into English sometime in the thirteenth century, replacing the Old English “geotan.” Some etymologies list its origin as unknown, while others suggest that it may have come from the Flanders dialect of Old French “purer” meaning “to sift grain, to pour out water.”