Hi, I’m still learning English and trying to understand the difference between insure and ensure.
I know that insure is used for insurance, like cars or health, and ensure means to make sure something happens. But sometimes I still get confused when reading sentences.
Can someone please give me a few more easy examples of both words in real life?
Also, are there any situations where both words can be used?
Thanks in advance for helping a beginner!
Based on that post you just wrote, I don’t think you can call yourself a beginner anymore.
It’s a little difficult to give simple examples for both ensure and insure because they’re more advanced vocabulary than I would use if I were speaking to someone who wasn’t very skilled in English. I did find this English stack exchange answer which might help:
For me the big difference is that insure is a legal document/formal contract that you have. Ensure means almost the same thing, but doesn’t have the same formal contract. By getting insurance they’re ensuring that they’ll take care of things if something goes wrong 
If it makes you feel better, much like affect vs effect and lay vs lie, this is something that native speakers also struggle with.
Insure is done to prepare for the consequences of something going wrong - and to minimize/recover from those consequences. Think of it like invest in
Ensure is done to prevent the bad thing from occurring; or to make a good thing happen. Think of it like guarantee or make sure
I’m not a good judge of what’s easy/hard examples, but here are some example sentences for insure and ensure.
From those examples:
“The ceremony was held at 8:30 a.m., to insure that the Russians didn’t beat them to it.”
“First, how long will the cheese take to deliver, and how will it be shipped to insure freshness?”
Both sentences sound weird to me, and I would have used ensure instead
hy, i am still learning english but sometimes i can’t understand difficult words. which makes me confuse. by the way thank you for explaining.
thank you for your explaination. i got it.
Ensure = to make sure something happens
I will ensure the door is locked.
Insure = to buy protection
I will insure my car.
@shitsurei @暁のルナ you guys are really helpful. no one guides like this. thank you.
I think that allowing use of “insure” there is perhaps a US English thing. As a native British English speaker, I would use “ensure” in both, and consider “insure” an error.
These words used to be just spelling variations of a single word; it wasn’t until the 19th century that the idea of assigning different senses of the word to different spellings beame popular.
I’m an American and would also consider those errors 
I think this comes down to what @shitsurei mentioned where even natives mix them up due to the similar pronunciation (maybe even same pronunciation in some dialects?) and very close spelling.
Interestingly, the ensure page had no erroneous sentences that I noticed. So the mix-up seems to go one way. I am American as well btw… At first I was like “I wonder if it’s a British thing?” 
Interesting that they both used to be the same word
