- a boring student
- a bored student
The first says something insulting about the student. If you want to describe a student who would rather be somewhere else, you should use the second.
A student might describe himself as bored and one of his lessons as boring. It is not a coincidence that these look like forms of the verb bore. Consider the following sentence:
- The lesson bored the student.
If we wanted to focus on the role of the subject or the role of the object, we could rephrase it as one of the following:
- The lesson was boring. [progressive]
- The student was bored. [passive]
The subject (the lesson) of the active sentence can be described as boring and the object (the student) can be described as bored. It is the same when they are used as attributive adjectives:
- The boring lesson
- The bored student
Here are some other verbs that follow the same pattern:
