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Homographs are words with the same spelling but different meanings or pronunciations. They should not be confused with homophones, which sound the same. Homonyms are words that are both homographs and homophones. Multiple meanings of a word are not homographs, but manifestations of a word. Some homographs can also have homophones.
Homograph means “spelled the same,” and homographs are words with the same spelling, but a different meaning or different pronunciation, or both. Bear the noun referring to an animal and bear meaning “to carry” are examples of a number of homographs that have the same spelling but a different meaning. Read, which serves as both the present tense of a verb when pronounced /REED/ and the past tense when pronounced /RED/, is an example of a homograph with a different meaning and different pronunciation in each instance.
Don’t confuse homograph with homophone, which means “sounds the same.” Even though some homographs – those in the first group above – are also homophones, not all homographs are. The special noun for a word that is both homograph and homophone is homonym.
It is also important to distinguish homographs, which are separate and distinct words with different origins, from words with multiple meanings all rooted in the same origin. For example, peer meaning “to look closely” comes from Middle English piren and peren, short for aperen, and is related to appear. Peer meaning “a person of equal standing”, derives from Middle English from Old French for the meaning of “equal” and from the Latin par. Yes, they look the same; no, they are not related. So these words are homographs, not words with multiple meanings.
An example of a word with multiple meanings is say. say is a
• transitive verb, for example, “They say hello”.
• a noun, for example, “I want to have my say”.
• an adverb, for example, “Take a fruit, say an orange”.
• an interjection, for example, “Say! What is that?”
All of these forms and meanings are related, so these are manifestations of a word, not homographs.
There is another case, more complicated, because a homograph can also have homophones. For example, air which means “odourless gases we breathe” is a homograph of air which means “to transmit”, but it also has homophones: are, Ayr, e’er, ere, err and erede.
