This is it - if you hear the word "wary" and know the verb "to wear" before encountering the written word "weary" it's totally understandable to assume that is how "wary" is written and to mix them up.
What I wanted to do with my comment is show this without coming across as a mean or pedantic - especially since in the context both work ok. I've no idea if I accomplished that, I probably come across as a dick but I hope I don't.
You said it's not a thing. It is, in fact, a thing. I've heard it and said it often enough to be sure it's not so uncommon that it's reasonable to say it's not a thing.
You also need to keep in mind what Google Ngram is.
>> "When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., "British English", "English Fiction", "French") over the selected years."
It's a collection of books. Books remain relevant, but it tells you nothing of usage outside that. You only have to run a search on Google to see that it's used in a wide range of unrelated contexts. It's not some obscure anachronism or regionalism.
Even if that's the case, it's very easy to hear "grow weary" and conflate it with the similar word "wary", coming up with "grow wary" as a malapropism.
Those pronunciation guides confused me a lot before I scanned back, and read the words themselves (trying to ignore the pronunciations I'd already seen!) - so let me proffer:
- weary 'weir[in a river]-(r)ee'
- wary 'wear[clothes]-(r)ee'
Which just goes to demonstrate how weird and multi-sourced English is, doesn't it. And also maybe we just pronounce these very differently (I'm British) - 'way-ray' is way off to me.
I add the '(r)' because being British (and I believe some of the US) an 'r' following a vowel is under-pronounced (in the opinion of some other accent holders), as in 'wear', but not when followed by another (pseudo)vowel, in 'weary' - but that may not be the case for you.
Scotland - and the emphasis is on the first syllable ("wea-" is about 1.5-2x longer than "ry", with the "r" short and rolled). But remember mapping pronunciation of spoken-English to Latin characters is a little bit ambiguous due to accents. For example you use the word "where" to help describe how you pronounce "wary", but for me that "wh" in "where" is slightly aspirated.
In the case of the parent comment however, weary does work.