Homophone

This article is about the term in linguistics. For other uses, see Homophony (disambiguation).

Euler diagram showing the relationships between homophones (purple) and related linguistic concepts.

A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning. The words may be spelled the same, such as rose (flower) and rose (past tense of "rise"), or differently, such as carat, caret, and carrot, or to, two, and too. Homophones that are spelled the same are also both homographs and homonyms. Homophones that are spelled differently are also called heterographs. The term "homophone" may also apply to units longer or shorter than words, such as phrases, letters or groups of letters that are pronounced the same as another phrase, letter or group of letters.

The word derives from the Greek homo- (ὁμο-), "same", and phōnḗ (φωνή), "voice, utterance". The opposite is heterophone: similar, but not phonetically identical words.

In wordplay and games

Homophones are often used to create puns and to deceive the reader (as in crossword puzzles) 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' & 'berth' and "told' & 'toll'd' (tolled) in his poem "Faithless Sally Brown":

His death, which happen'd in his berth,

At forty-odd befell:

They went and told the sexton, and

The sexton toll'd the bell.

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 (a minimal pair) are homophonous in the accent with the merger. Some examples from English are:

pin and pen in many southern American accents.

merry, marry, and Mary in most American accents.

The pairs do, due and forward, foreword are homophonous in most American accents but not in most British accents.

The pairs talk, torque, and court, caught are distinguished in rhotic accents such as Scottish English and most dialects of American English, but are homophones in many non-rhotic accents such as British Received Pronunciation.

Homophones of multiple words or phrases (as sometimes seen in word games) are also known as "oronyms". This term was coined by Gyles Brandreth and first published in his book The Joy of Lex (1980), and it was used in the BBC programme Never Mind the Full Stops, which also featured Brandreth as a guest.

Examples of "oronyms" (which may only be true homophones in certain dialects of English) include:

"ice cream" vs. "I scream" (as in the popular song "I scream. You scream. We all scream for ice cream.")

"euthanasia" vs. "Youth in Asia"

"depend" vs. "deep end"

"the sky" vs. "this guy" (most notably as a mondegreen in Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix)

"four candles" vs. "fork handles"

"sand which is there" vs. "sandwiches there"

"example" vs. "egg sample"

"some others" vs. "some mothers" and also vs. "smothers"

"night rain" vs. "night train"

"minute" vs. "my newt"

"Long Island" vs. "lawn guy land"

"real eyes, realize, real lies"

"a dressed male, addressed mail"

"Lu don’t move no cowards, Lu don’t move no cow herds"

In his Appalachian comedy routine, American comedian Jeff Foxworthy frequently uses oronyms which play on exaggerated "country" accents. Notable examples include:

Initiate: "My wife ate two sandwiches, initiate [and then she ate] a bag o' tater chips."
Mayonnaise: "Mayonnaise [Man, there is] a lot of people here tonight."
Innuendo: "Hey dude I saw a bird fly innuendo [in your window]."
Moustache: "I Moustache [must ask] you a question..."

Malapropisms, which often create a similar comic effect, are usually near-homophones. See also Eggcorn.

Use in psychological research

Pseudo-homophones

Pseudo-homophones are pseudowords that are phonetically identical to a word. For example, groan/grone and crane/crain are pseudo-homophone pairs, whereas plane/plain is a homophone pair since both letter strings are recognised words. Both types of pairs are used in lexical decision tasks to investigate word recognition.

Use as ambiguous information

Homophones where one spelling is of a threatening nature and one is not (e.g. slay/sleigh, war/wore) have been used in studies of anxiety as a test of cognitive models that those with high anxiety tend to interpret ambiguous information in a threatening manner.

See also

• Heterography and homography
• Oronym

Wiktionary

• List of dialect-independent homophones
• List of dialect-dependent homophones

External links

• Homophone.com; Complete List of American homophones with a searchable database.
• Homophone Machine; Swaps homophones in any sentence
• Between The Lions; Song about homophones