Right Ear Ringing: Spiritual Meaning, Left vs Right & Tinnitus

If you want one sentence: the right ear is usually the good one in English tradition, but the exceptions are numerous enough and old enough that anyone stating it as a rule is over-simplifying.

The belief is genuinely ancient. Pliny the Elder set it down in his Natural History, Book 28, chapter 5, among a catalogue of everyday customs he mostly found silly:

quin et absentes tinnitu aurium praesentire sermones de se receptum est.

In H. Rackham's Loeb translation: "Moreover, according to an accepted belief absent people can divine by the ringing in their ears that they are the object of talk." The Victorian Bostock and Riley version renders it "the tingling of the ears".

That is the whole of it. Pliny does not mention the left ear or the right. The phrase receptum est — "it is a received belief" — tells you he is reporting what people said, not endorsing it.

Pliny was not alone. Around 170 CE Lucian has a maid greet a returning slave with ἦ που, ὦ Παρμένων, ἐβόμβει τὰ ὦτα ὑμῖν; — "Surely, Parmenon, your ears must have been buzzing?" — because her mistress had been speaking of him constantly. Worth noting that the standard English translation renders the Greek buzz as burn, quietly merging two signs that the rest of this page will show were kept apart.

This matters because the modern version of this page, on almost every site that has one, tells you Pliny distinguished a praising right ear from a slandering left. He did not. The split is a later addition, and once you look at where it was written down, it turns out not to be one tradition at all.

The Victorian folklorists went county by county, and they contradict each other in print.

Right is the good ear, according to:

• Durham — William Henderson, Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties (1879): "If the right ear tingles, you are being spoken well of; if the left ear, some one is speaking ill of you."
• The west of Scotland — James Napier (1879): "If it were the right ear which did so, then the speech was favourable; if the left ear, the reverse."
• Sheffield and the surrounding country — Sidney Addy, Household Tales (1895): "If your left ear burns people are speaking evil of you, but if your right ear burns they are speaking good."

Left is the good ear, according to:

• Lancashire — Harland and Wilkinson, Lancashire Folk-Lore (1867): "If a person's left ear burn, or feel hot, somebody is praising the party; if the right ear burn, then it is a sure sign that some one is speaking evil of the person."
• France — noted by T. F. Thiselton Dyer in English Folk-Lore (1878): "In France, this superstition differs somewhat from ours, for the tingling of the left ear denotes the friend, and the tingling of the right ear the enemy."
• England in 1620 — John Melton's Astrologaster, listing superstitions he thought ridiculous: "That when the left cheeke burnes, it is a signe some bodie talkes well of you, but if the right cheeke burnes, it is a signe of ill."

Lancashire and Durham are neighbours. Both were recorded by careful collectors, twelve years apart, and they say opposite things.

The rhyme most often quoted today — "left for love, right for spite" — does not appear in any of the nineteenth-century English collections. What Addy recorded in 1895 is the reverse, and it has a third line that almost nobody repeats:

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

In the Irish Schools' Collection of 1937–39 you can find both polarities within the same archive, and at least one account that contradicts itself in three consecutive sentences.

This is the distinction the modern versions have lost, and it changes the answer.

Walter Gregor, collecting in the north-east of Scotland for the Folk-Lore Society in 1881, recorded them separately: "Ringing in the ears was called the 'dead bell.' A glow in the ears indicated that the tongue of calumny was busy."

Napier gives the same split for the west of Scotland: people hearing "a tingling sound in their ears, called the deid bells, expected news of the death of a friend or neighbour."

So in Scottish tradition: a burning ear meant gossip. A ringing ear meant a death.

Wales agrees. Jonathan Ceredig Davies, Folk-Lore of West and Mid-Wales (1911), lists among death portents: "The sound in the ear as of a bell, is a token of death in the family" — set beside the Cŵn Annwn and the Gwrach y Rhibyn, the country's other death omens. Elsewhere in the same book he gives ringing a milder reading — right ear for good news, left for unpleasant — but note that he says news, not gossip, and he reserves the "someone is praising you" sense for a different omen entirely.

Ireland took the death association somewhere else, and this is the most distinctive material in the whole tradition. It is recorded dozens of times in the Schools' Collection, gathered from schoolchildren across the country in 1937–39 and now digitised by the National Folklore Collection:

"When you hear a bell ringing in your ear it is a sign that a soul in Purgatory that needs your help. If you say 'Three Hail Marys' for the soul the ringing in your ear will stop."

Another account, from a different county: "If there is a ringing in your ear, it is a sign that the souls in Purgatory are asking your prayers."

The remedies are as specific as the sign. Three Hail Marys. Saying "Lord have mercy on the dead." Making the sign of the cross on the ear. In Irish, the prayer recorded is "Go mba bhfad uainn an anacain, beannacht Dé le h-anam na marbh."

Elsewhere in the same archive the ear-bell is simply a death notice — and one account splits it by sex: the left ear for a male friend, the right for a female.

If the ear meant you were being slandered, the folklore did not leave you helpless. Every remedy below is recorded in a named nineteenth-century collection.

1. Bite your little finger. The person speaking ill of you will bite their tongue. (Napier, west of Scotland)
2. Bite the corner of your neck-tie. The same result, by the same logic. (Gregor, north-east Scotland)
3. Make the sign of the cross on the ear three times — "the slanderer will bite his own tongue." (Addy, Sheffield)
4. Name the person you suspect. If the ringing stops, you were right. (Irish Schools' Collection)

And from Cornwall, a charm to be said aloud, recorded by Dyer:

Right cheek! — left cheek! — why do you burn? Cursed be she that doth me any harm: If she be a maid, let her be a slaid; If she be a widow, long let her mourn; But if it be my own true love — burn, cheek, burn.

Chinese tradition reads the sign by time of day rather than by good or ill, and it does distinguish the ears. Most English-language pages that mention this treat it as a curiosity from an old almanac. It is considerably more than that.

The version usually quoted comes from the Yuxiaji (《玉匣記》, "Jade Box Records"), a popular almanac. Here is part of the ear-ringing table, right ear first:

But the Yuxiaji is the last link in this chain, not the first. It is a commercial almanac attributed to a fourth-century Daoist, an attribution the text itself acknowledges as borrowed, and it is attested only from the late Ming onward. The practice it prints is far older, and the trail is documented at every stage:

• First century. The imperial book catalogue in the Book of Han lists a work in sixteen volumes: 《嚏耳鳴雜占》, Miscellaneous Divination by Sneezing and Ear-Ringing. The book is lost; the catalogue entry proves the genre was official enough to shelve. Even then, sneezing and ear-ringing were already paired.
• Second century. The scholar Cai Yong writes 「目瞤耳鳴，近夫小戒也」 — a twitching eye and a ringing ear are minor warnings. The Miscellaneous Records of the Western Capital gives "eye-twitch means wine and food", which is word for word what the almanac would still be printing fifteen hundred years later.
• Tang dynasty. Among the manuscripts sealed in the Dunhuang caves is one catalogued as 《占耳鳴耳熱心驚面熱目瞤等法》 — "methods for divining by ear-ringing, ear-burning, heart-palpitation, face-burning and eye-twitching". The same family of body omens, six centuries before the almanac.
• Southern Song. The twelve-hour table takes its fixed form in Yu Hui's 《百怪斷經》, which lays out 耳鳴占 and 耳熱占 as separate tables — ringing and burning again treated as different signs.
• Yuan and Ming. It passes into household encyclopedias, and the Qing imperial compendium reprints the tables while naming Yu Hui as the source.

Two cautions the page will not skip. Editions differ, and the hour tables reproduced on English-language sites frequently diverge from the text — so treat any single version as one recension. And one correction: the claim that Chinese tradition holds a ringing ear means someone is talking about you. That belief is Roman. In Chinese sources the "someone is speaking of me" sign is sneezing — which is exactly the pairing the Han catalogue recorded, and exactly the distinction this page keeps running into.

Japanese folk belief, recorded in municipal histories and gathered into the National Museum of Japanese History's folk-belief database, divides the two sensations exactly as Scotland did.

Burning ears mean you are being talked about. In Tōhoku the saying is 耳がほてる — "the ears burn" — and it is attested across Miyagi, Iwate, Akita and Aomori. One record from Zaō in Miyagi even splits it: the right ear means family, the left means outsiders. Elsewhere in Iwate the split is by the speaker's sex rather than their closeness, and the two schemes contradict each other, exactly as the English counties do.

Itchy ears carry the same meaning again, in Fukuoka, Kyoto, Kōchi, Miyazaki and Fukushima. And in Gifu and Aichi, burning ears mean neither — just plain good luck, and in some records specifically luck in a lottery.

Ringing ears mean a death. Of the ear-ringing records in that national database, not one is about gossip. The dominant reading is that someone of your own age has died:

耳の中がサンサンと鳴ると、同年の人が死ぬ。 "When your ears ring, a person of the same age dies."

In Nara the sound has a name — ミミガネ, the "ear-bell" — and chanting the nembutsu three times was said to stop it, which is close enough to the Irish three Hail Marys to be striking. There is even a nationwide custom built on the same idea: 耳塞ぎ, ear-stopping, in which you plug your ears with rice cake when someone your own age dies, so that the dead cannot call you after them.

So two traditions with no contact — Scottish and Irish on one side, Japanese on the other — independently landed on the same division: a burning ear is about the living, a ringing ear is about the dead. That is a stronger reason to take the distinction seriously than any single collector's note.

One correction while we are here, because it is the same error as the Chinese one: Japanese fortune-telling sites now attach the "someone is talking about you" meaning to 耳鳴り, ringing. The folklore record does not support it. In Japan, as in Scotland, the gossip sign is the ear that burns.

Set the collections side by side and a pattern appears that no single one of them states.

*The gossip reading follows the ear that burns. German folk tradition is emphatic about it — and instructive, because the German burning sign is not the ear at all. In the Rhineland the pair is Ohr klingt, Wange brennt: the ear rings, the cheek burns. Adolf Wuttke recorded in East Prussia and Silesia that a glowing left cheek means you are being praised and a glowing right cheek that you are being slandered. Iceland says the same thing about cheeks and even names the side: vina-kinn*, the friend-cheek, is the left.

The ringing reading follows death. This is where the traditions converge most strongly, and they had no contact with each other:

Nine traditions, five language families, and one shared reading. The Belarusian and the Irish are almost the same sentence, recorded a thousand miles apart with no route between them. Denmark is the European outlier: there the ringing ear does mean you are being talked about, right ear for praise and left for slander, recorded by Thiele in the 1820s.

Where the ringing ear does mean gossip, the left-right rule still will not settle. German sources from the fourteenth century onward run right-good, left-bad — a Frankfurt book of 1556 states it flatly, and Zingerle found it alive in the Tyrol in 1871. But Low German territory reverses it for the sake of a rhyme, Dat linke, dat flinke, dat rechte, dat slechte, and the standard German reference work on superstition warns outright that the values of the two sides "swap often, even within the same region". In Greece, Abbott recorded the Macedonian rule as left-good; Lawson recorded the general Greek rule as right-good, in a book published seven years later. Russian and Croatian invert each other outright: Dal has ringing in the right ear meaning good news, while in the Slavonian village of Otok a whistling right ear means bad news — which is why, Lovretić noted, nobody there ever asks which ear it is unless it is the left one.

And one tradition says the sign is not yours to read. Ivan Franko, collecting proverbs in his own Galician village, recorded the Ukrainian reading as a test rather than a message: you ask someone "in which of my ears is it ringing?", and if they guess right it proves they were telling the truth, or that they are fond of you. He noted the "someone is speaking of you behind your back" sense as the German one, not the Ukrainian. From Orelets in Pokuttia comes the most vivid version anywhere — when the ear rings, the devil and the angel have met, and the two are fighting.

And two traditions read it by the calendar instead. The Chinese tables go by the hour. Ottoman Turkish has a whole written genre for it — the çınnâme, a verse form translated from Arabic and Persian, which reads a ringing ear by the day of the week: Saturday brings good news, Tuesday and Friday bring harm.

So the honest answer to "what does a ringing right ear mean" is that it depends on which century you are standing in, which valley, and whether the ear is ringing or burning — and that most of the world's traditions, asked about ringing specifically, answered a death rather than a compliment.

Three verses use the phrase, and they are cited constantly on pages about ear ringing:

• 1 Samuel 3:11 — "I will do a thing in Israel, at which both the ears of every one that heareth it shall tingle."
• 2 Kings 21:12 — "...that whosoever heareth of it, both his ears shall tingle."
• Jeremiah 19:3 — "...the which whosoever heareth, his ears shall tingle."

The Hebrew verb is the same in all three: tsalal, a word for a sound that reverberates, like a struck cymbal. It appears only four times in the whole Hebrew Bible — these three, and once in Habakkuk where it is lips that quiver in terror.

Its meaning is not subtle and it is not about gossip. The Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon glosses it as tingling "at horrid sound... all of dreadful news". The commentators are unanimous: horror, dread, being stunned by an announcement of catastrophe. One modern translation note calls the phrase simply "proverbial for a tremendous disaster".

So if you are looking for a scriptural warrant for reading your ringing ear as a message, this is not it. The verses describe the reaction of someone hearing terrible news — not a sign given to an individual. Devotional writing that connects the two is doing something the text does not do, and it is worth knowing which is which.

Old enough to be a cliché by the sixteenth century.

Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, Book II — Pandarus, planning to gossip about Troilus the moment he is out of sight:

And we shal speke of thee som-what, I trowe, Whan thou art goon, to do thyne eres glowe!

John Heywood, 1546: "I suppose that day her ears might well glow, / For all the town talked of her, high and low." By 1562 he was making a joke that only works if the saying is universally known.

Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, Act 3 Scene 1 — Beatrice, having just overheard herself discussed: "What fire is in mine ears?"

And from the mid-1500s interlude Jack Juggler, a reminder that the sign was not always about being talked about at all. The character, on the point of telling a lie, reads his burning ear as plain bad luck:

For I feel a vengeable burning in my left ear; ... And surely I shall have some ill hap, For my hair standeth up under my cap.

Ringing in one or both ears with no external source is called tinnitus, and it is common: surveys estimate 10 to 25% of adults experience it. The Mayo Clinic describes it as a symptom of more than 200 different conditions rather than a disease in itself, and notes that about nine in ten people with tinnitus have some hearing loss caused by noise.

The usual causes are ordinary — loud noise, hearing loss that comes with age, earwax, an ear infection, or a side effect of medication.

Because this page is about one ear, one point deserves emphasis. Ear, nose and throat specialists single out tinnitus in a single ear for prompt attention: their guidance calls for a hearing test where tinnitus is one-sided, persistent, or comes with hearing loss.

See a doctor if:

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

None of that makes the folklore less interesting. It just means the folklore is not a diagnosis, and a sign that repeats every day is telling you something about your ears rather than about your friends.