Left Ear Ringing: Spiritual Meaning & Why Sources Disagree

Four of those say the left ear is the good one. Six say it is the bad one. They are all first-hand records made by careful collectors, and several of them are neighbours.

The honest answer is that there is no single tradition here to be right about.

“Left for love, right for spite” is the version you will find repeated everywhere, and it is genuine — but it is younger and more local than it is usually made to sound, and it belongs to ears, not eyes.

Its earliest exact appearance is a reader's note in Notes and Queries, 5 July 1890, reporting it from Hampshire under the heading “Folk-lore: ears burning”:

If your ears burn, the sign is: Left for love, and right for spite: Left or right, good at night. In the case of the right ear I have been advised to pinch it, and the person who is speaking spitefully of me will immediately bite his or her tongue.

Two things follow, and both are usually lost.

The second line is the older half, and it started out about the eye. The Connoisseur, a London periodical, printed it in March 1755 in a satirical catalogue of body omens: “If your right eye itches, you will cry; if your left, you will laugh: but left or right is good at night.” The tag-line was already circulating a hundred and thirty-five years before the love/spite couplet it now ends.

And the polarity is not fixed even inside the rhyme's own family. Sidney Addy recorded the Sheffield version in 1895 with the sides reversed:

Right for love and left for spite, But either side is good at night.

In the Irish Schools' Collection of the late 1930s you can find both polarities within the same archive, and one variant that scrambles them outright: “Left for right and right for spite and both for love when they are warm at night.”

So the rhyme is real English folklore. What it is not is ancient, universal, or about eyes — and the third line, which answers the question people actually arrive with, is dropped from every modern version.

This is the distinction that changes the answer, and it is the one the modern pages have lost.

Walter Gregor, collecting in north-east Scotland in 1881, wrote them down as two separate omens: "Ringing in the ears was called the 'dead bell.' A glow in the ears indicated that the tongue of calumny was busy."

So the gossip belonged to the ear that burned. The ear that rang meant something else entirely — and the traditions that make that split are not a regional quirk. They are most of the map:

Germany makes the same split from the other side: there the burning sign is not the ear but the cheek. The Rhineland pairing is Ohr klingt, Wange brennt — the ear rings, the cheek burns — and Wuttke recorded that a glowing left cheek means praise while a glowing right cheek means slander.

So if your left ear is ringing rather than hot, the older traditions would not have told you someone was talking about you. Most of them would have told you to think of the dead.

A few sources single the left ear out rather than treating it as the opposite of the right.

Ireland attaches a sex to it. One account in the Schools' Collection has the left ear announce the death of a male friend and the right a female one — the ear is not reporting an opinion, it is naming who.

Japan does the same thing with heat rather than sound. In Iwate the record runs: if the left earlobe burns, a man is praising you; if the right, a woman. A neighbouring account in the same prefecture keeps the sexes and flips praise to slander — the two schemes sit a few valleys apart, contradicting each other exactly as the English counties do.

Ireland again, on the practical side: when the ringing came, you asked someone to guess which ear it was. If they guessed right, the ringing stopped and you had found the person thinking of you. The same guessing game is recorded in Ukraine — where Ivan Franko noted that a correct guess proved the guesser had told you the truth, or that they were fond of you — and in Croatia, where a wrong guess meant the news you were about to hear would be false.

And from Orelets in Pokuttia, the most vivid reading anywhere: when the ear rings, the devil and the angel have met, and the two are fighting.

The folklore has less to say here than the search results suggest, and what it does say is worth quoting exactly.

Addy's rhyme is the clearest: "either side is good at night" — the doubling cancels the quarrel between the sides. The Irish variant agrees: "both for love when they are warm at night."

The biblical phrase that gets cited in this context — "both his ears shall tingle" — is not about this at all. It appears in 1 Samuel 3:11, 2 Kings 21:12 and Jeremiah 19:3, and in every case it describes the reaction of anyone who hears an announcement of catastrophe. The Hebrew verb is used four times in the whole Bible and always for involuntary shock at a terrible sound. Lexicons gloss it as tingling "at horrid sound... all of dreadful news." It is horror, not a message.

On the practical side, both ears ringing at once is also the pattern most worth mentioning to a doctor — see the last section.

Every remedy below is recorded in a named collection, and most of them share one logic: whatever the slanderer is doing with their tongue, you make it hurt.

1. Bite your little finger — the person speaking ill of you bites their tongue. (Napier, west of Scotland)
2. Bite the corner of your neck-tie — same result. (Gregor, north-east Scotland)
3. Bite the top fastening of your shirt — "and a blister will grow on the liar's tongue." (Germany, recorded by Grimm; an older version appears in an 18th-century Vienna manuscript)
4. Make the sign of the cross on the ear three times. (Addy, Sheffield — and independently in Ireland)
5. In the Upper Palatinate, when the left ear rings you stand up and smack yourself on the backside with the right hand, hard, and then the bad person bites their tongue.
6. Name the person you suspect. If the ringing stops, you were right. (Ireland, Ukraine, Germany, Croatia — the most widely recorded remedy of all)

And where the ringing meant a death rather than gossip, the response was prayer rather than retaliation: three Hail Marys in Ireland, the nembutsu three times in Nara. In Croatia you crossed yourself beside the ear and said: "The Cross, the name of Jesus; if it is for good, whistle; if for ill, do not whistle."

Ringing with no external source is tinnitus, and it is common — surveys put it at 10 to 25% of adults. The Mayo Clinic calls it a symptom of more than 200 different conditions rather than a disease in itself, and notes that about nine in ten people who have it also have some noise-related hearing loss.

Because this page is about one ear, one point matters more than the rest. Ear, nose and throat specialists single out one-sided tinnitus for prompt attention: their guidance calls for a hearing test where tinnitus is unilateral, persistent, or accompanied by hearing loss.

See a doctor if:

• the ringing is in one ear only, or will not go away
• it beats in time with your pulse — the NHS advises an urgent appointment for this
• it comes with sudden hearing loss, dizziness, or numbness or weakness in the face, arm or leg — treat this as emergency care
• it began after a head injury, a car accident or a sporting injury
• it started after a cold and has not cleared within a week
• it is making you anxious or low, or keeping you awake

The folklore is worth knowing and none of it is a diagnosis. A sign that arrives every day is telling you something about your ears rather than about your friends.