Homophones are words that sound the same but have different spellings and meanings. Common examples include there/they’re/their and two/too/to. Homophones should not be confused with homographs, which are spelled the same but have different meanings, or homonyms, which sound and look the same but have different meanings. Pronunciation and dialect can also affect whether words are considered homophones. Variant spellings and multiple meanings do not create homophones.
Homophone means “sounds the same,” and a homophone is a word that sounds like another word, yet has a different spelling and a different meaning. Many examples of homophones appear in frequently confused word lists. They are the words that make up one of the largest classes of typos. Some examples of common homophones that people often substitute for each other when writing include the following:
there, they, are
also, a, two
all ready, already
capital, chapter
cite, see, site
stationary, stationery
idle, idol
his is
lead, conduit
miner, minor
very quietly
time, if
all together, altogether
who is it, whose?
The word homophone should not be confused with homograph, which means “written the same”. Homophone should also be distinguished from homonym, which refers to a word that sounds the same and looks the same, but has a different meaning and different origin from another word.
However, what “same sound” means is open to some interpretation, because not everyone agrees that the pronunciation must be identical for two words to be homophones. For example, Merriam-Webster dictionaries identify words that sound alike but have a different accent as homophones. An example is the noun insight, which is stressed on the first syllable, and the verb incite, which is stressed on the second and final syllable.
Also, since dialects of English include as a matter of fact different pronunciations, it is a fact that different people have different homophones. As the famous example says, for some English speakers, Mary, Merry and Marty are homophones. For others, they are words in which the vowels have three distinct pronunciations.
When identifying homophones, it is important to keep in mind that variant spellings do not create homophones. For example, yogurt and yoghurt are not homophones; they are the same word written two different ways. The same goes for cookies and biscuits. This also applies to words with multiple meanings, which are considered to be one word, and therefore cannot be called homographs.
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