Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun One of two or more words, such as night and knight, that are pronounced the same but differ in meaning, origin, and sometimes spelling.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A letter or character expressing a like sound with another.
- noun A word having the same sound as another, but differing in meaning and usually in derivation, and often in spelling; a homonym.
- noun Same as
homophony .
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun A letter or character which expresses a like sound with another.
- noun A word having the same sound as another, but differing from it in meaning and usually in spelling
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A letter or group of letters which are pronounced the same as another letter or group of letters.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun two words are homophones if they are pronounced the same way but differ in meaning or spelling or both (e.g. bare and bear)
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Homo means same and phone means sound, so the word homophone literally means same sound.
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Writing the wrong homophone is easy, and typing the wrong one incredibly easy – and for a lot of reasons, they’re easy to make and hard to spot.
Book Review: Things That Make Us [Sic] makes me slightly ill « Motivated Grammar
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I thought the homophone was the pink phone on Commissioner Gordon's desk that he used when he wanted to go on the down low with Titus?
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It's the use of homophone, which is a word with the same sound but that's spelled differently with a different meaning.
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Interestingly, in appears that in the scientific literature "homophone" and "homograph" mean the same thing, which explains why there are so many papers about mispronouncing homophones.
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Interestingly, in appears that in the scientific literature "homophone" and "homograph" mean the same thing, which explains why there are so many papers about mispronouncing homophones.
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There is actually quite a bit of reason to think that the 2nd singular 'homophone' wasn't even a homophone, after all they didn't match in rhyme class.
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At some point things become suspected if not known, and I should not like to be grain of salt that tips the scales, nor the cause of said homophone falling from your wife's trusting eyes.
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• Near homophone corner: "If you want to revel in the dappled shade of the most beautiful canapé of plane trees in Europe, go now."
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The almost-too-cute homophone in the subtitle — halving your cake — is the sort of device that can bode ominously.
sonofgroucho commented on the word homophone
Here's a list of English Homophones.
February 14, 2008