Homophone means "sounds the same," and a homophone is a word that sounds the same as another word, while having a different spelling and a different meaning. Many homophone examples turn up in lists of frequently confused words. They are the words that make up one of the largest classes of typo. Some examples of common homophones that people often substitute for each other when writing include the following:
- there, their, they're
- too, to, two
- all ready, already
- capital, capitol
- cite, sight, site
- stationary, stationery
- idle, idol
- its, it's
- lead, led
- miner, minor
- plain, plane
- weather, whether
- all together, altogether
- who's, 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 both sounds the same and looks the same, but has a different meaning from and different origin than another word.
What "same sound" means is open to some interpretation however, because not everyone agrees that pronunciation has to be identical for two words to be homophones. For example, the Merriam-Webster dictionaries identify as homophones words that sound the same while having different stress. An example is the noun insight, which is accented on the first syllable, and the verb incite, which is accented on the second and final syllable.
In addition, since the dialects of English include as one facet different pronunciations, it is a fact that different people have different homophones. As the famous example goes, for some speakers of English, Mary, merry, and marry are homophones. For others, they are words in which the vowels have three quite distinct pronunciations.
When identifying homophones, it is important to keep in mind that spelling variants do not create homophones. For example, yoghurt and yogurt are not homophones; they're the same word spelled two different ways. The same goes for cookie and cooky. This is also true for multiple-meaning words, which are considered to be a single word, and therefore not eligible to be called homographs.
