Homophone


A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning or in spelling. The two words may be spelled the same, for example rose and rose, or spelled differently, as in rain, reign, and rein. The term homophone sometimes applies to units longer or shorter than words, for example a phrase, letter, or groups of letters which are pronounced the same as a counterpart. Any unit with this property is said to be homophonous.
Homophones that are spelled the same are both homographs and homonyms. For example, the word read, in "He is well read" and in "Yesterday, I read that book".
Homophones that are spelled differently are also called heterographs, e.g. to, too, and two.

Wordplay and games

Homophones are often used to create puns and to deceive the reader or to suggest multiple meanings. The last usage is common in poetry and creative literature. An example of this is seen in Dylan Thomas's radio play Under Milk Wood: "The shops in mourning" where mourning can be heard as mourning or morning. Another vivid example is Thomas Hood's use of birth and berth as well as told and toll'd in his poem "Faithless Sally Brown":
In some accents, various sounds have merged in that they are no longer distinctive, and thus words that differ only by those sounds in an accent that maintains the distinction are homophonous in the accent with the merger. Some examples from English are:
Wordplay is particularly common in English because the multiplicity of linguistic influences offers considerable complication in spelling and meaning and pronunciation compared with other languages.
Malapropisms, which often create a similar comic effect, are usually near-homophones. See also Eggcorn.

Same-sounding phrases

During the 1980s, an attempt was made to promote a distinctive term for same-sounding multiple words or phrases, by referring to them as "oronyms",
but since the term oronym was already well established in linguistics as an onomastic designation for a class of toponymic features, the alternative use of the same term was not well-accepted in scholarly literature.

In various languages

English

Certain word pairs that were historically variant spellings of the same words, but eventually standardized as distinct homophonous words by mere spelling, include:
  • flour and flower: flour is the older spelling used for the later meaning ; flower is the later spelling used for the original meaning. The verb flourish is spelt more similarly to the noun flour.
  • discrete and discreet: discrete maintains the original meaning ; discreet is used for the later meaning, although the noun discretion looks more similar to discrete. The split in spelling occurred after during the late 16th century when discreet was favored for the popular meaning of "prudent," while discrete is favored in academic contexts.
  • passed and past: past was one of the many variants of the past participle passed of the Middle English verb passen. During the 14th century, past was used specifically as an adjective and preposition, and during the 15th century as a noun by ellipsis with the earlier adjective. Compare the Romance cognates, French passé, Italian passato, Portuguese passado and Spanish pasado, all of which function as past participles, adjectives and nouns.
  • born and borne: these were variant spellings of the same past participle of bear, whose general meaning is "carry", but with one specific derived meaning, "birth". The distinction between born for "birthed" and borne for "carried" came to be sometime during the 17th century. Compare sworne, torne and worne, variants of sworn, torn and worn, that did not survive into present-day English.
Its was merely the genitive form of it and derived by adding the apostrophe and s, thus originally spelt it's, making it also a homograph of it's. The genitive it's was retained even toward the early 19th century. The spelling of aisle was altered with the silent letter s due to its historical homophony with isle in both French and English. Spelling alteration can also obscure homophony, such as the case of colonel, which prevailed over the historical variant coronel by the late Modern English period, but which is now still pronounced identically to kernel as if the r were still there in the spelling. The ye in dye is purposefully retained in its forms, especially its present participle dyeing, in order to distinguish it from the homophonous dying, which is the present participle of die.
Homophones can arise from borrowed words which end up being pronounced the same in English, such as profit and prophet. Sometimes the English words are even homographs, such as quarry and quarry or policy and policy —see the discussion of English homographs from different Greek origins.
Many words were historically heterophonous, but after historical sound changes, including the Great Vowel Shift and various vowel mergers, they became homophonous. For example, ail and ale, both pronounced in Modern English, were respectively eile and ale in Middle English before the Great Vowel Shift. The verbs lie and lie used to be lēogan and liċġan in Old English; while will and will used to be willan and willian.
Ax e, an obsolescent variant of ask e, is homophonous with ax in some Scottish accents, but with arcs in some English accents such as Multicultural London English.
Epenthesis, which often occurs at the boundary between a nasal and a fricative, can cause some words that are phonemically distinct to become phonetically homophonous. For example, assistance may be pronounced, with an additional t like in assistants.

German

There are many homophones in present-day standard German. As in other languages, however, there exists regional and/or individual variation in certain groups of words or in single words, so that the number of homophones varies accordingly. Regional variation is especially common in words that exhibit the long vowels ä and e. According to the well-known dictionary Duden, these vowels should be distinguished as /ɛ:/ and /e:/, but this is not always the case, so that words like Ähre and Ehre may or may not be homophones.
Individual variation is shown by a pair like Gäste – Geste, the latter of which varies between /ˈɡe:stə/ and /ˈɡɛstə/ and by a pair like Stiel – Stil, the latter of which varies between /ʃtiːl/ and /stiːl/.
Besides websites that offer extensive lists of German homophones, there are others which provide numerous sentences with various types of homophones. In the German language homophones occur in more than 200 instances. Of these, a few are triples like
  • Waagen – Wagen – wagen
  • Waise – Weise – weise
Most are couples like lehren – leeren.

Spanish

Spanish has many homophones, but fewer than English. Some are homonyms, such as basta, which can either mean 'enough' or 'coarse', and some exist because of homophonous letters. For example, the letters b and v are pronounced exactly alike, so the words basta and vasta are pronounced identically.
Other homonyms are spelled the same, but mean different things in different genders. For example, the masculine noun el capital means 'capital' as in 'money', but the feminine noun la capital means 'capital city'.

Japanese

There are many homophones in Japanese, due to the use of Sino-Japanese vocabulary, where borrowed words and morphemes from Chinese are widely used in Japanese, but many phonemic contrasts, such as the original words' tones, are lost.
An extreme example is the pronunciation which, accounting for the "flat" pitch accent, is used for the following words:
  • 機構
  • 紀行
  • 稀覯
  • 騎行
  • 奇功
  • 起稿
  • 奇行
  • 機巧
  • 寄港
  • 帰校
  • 気功
  • 寄稿
  • 機甲
  • 帰航
  • 奇効
  • 季候
  • 気孔
  • 起工
  • 気候
  • 帰港
Upon adoption from Middle Chinese into Early Middle Japanese, certain sounds were modified or simplified to match Japanese phonology, causing homophony. For example, in the above list, 機構, 稀覯, 季候, 気功, 起稿, 帰校 and 紀行 may have been pronounced in Middle Chinese, but in Japanese. Furthermore, there were vowel fusions and mergers during Late Middle Japanese which furthered even more homophony. For example, 機構, 奇功, 起稿 and 紀行 were once pronounced distinctly as, but now all as.

Korean

The Korean language contains a combination of words that strictly belong to Korean and words that are loanwords from Chinese. Due to Chinese being pronounced with varying tones and Korean's removal of those tones, and because the modern Korean writing system, Hangeul, has a more finite number of phonemes than, for example, Latin-derived alphabets such as that of English, there are many homonyms with both the same spelling and pronunciation.
For example
  • : 'to put on makeup' vs. : 'to cremate'
  • : 'inheritance' vs. : 'miscarriage'
  • : 'fart' vs. : 'guard'
  • '밤': 'chestnut' vs. '밤': 'night'
There are heterographs, but far fewer, contrary to the tendency in English. For example,
  • '학문': 'learning' vs. '항문': 'anus'.
Using hanja, which are Chinese characters, such words are written differently.
As in other languages, Korean homonyms can be used to make puns. The context in which the word is used indicates which meaning is intended by the speaker or writer.