Homonym

(The definitions given here are based on those found in many standard modern dictionaries, but in practice there is a great deal of confusion about the precise meaning of these words, and a variety of other interpretations may be encountered.)

A homonym is a word that has the same pronunciation or spelling (or both) as another word, but a different meaning. Homonyms can be subdivided into:

Homophones – words that are pronounced the same (and may or may not be spelt the same), but differ in meaning, such as waste and waist.
Homographs – words that are spelt the same (and may or may not be pronounced the same), but differ in meaning, such as desert (abandon) and desert (arid region).

Homonyms that are spelt and pronounced the same are both homophones and homographs; for example, mean (intend) and mean (miserly).

Some sources state that hononym meanings must be unrelated (rather than just different), or that the words must have a different origin. Thus read (present tense) and read (past tense) would not be homonyms.

Heteronyms (also sometimes called heterophones) are words that are spelt the same but have different pronunciations and meanings (in other words, they are homographs which also differ in pronunciation). For example, desert (abandon) and desert are heteronyms, but mean (intend) and mean (miserly) are not.

In derivation, homonym means "same name", homophone means "same sound", homograph means "same writing", heteronym (somewhat confusingly) means "different name", and heterophone means "different sound".

Significant variant interpretations include:

Chambers 21st Century Dictionary [1] defines a homonym as "a word with the same sound and spelling as another, but with a different meaning" (my italics). Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary [2] also says that a homonym is "one of two or more words spelled and pronounced alike but different in meaning" (my italics), but appears to also give homonym as a synonym for either homophone or homograph.
Cambridge Dictionary of American English [3] defines homonym as "a word that is spelled the same as another word but that does not have the same meaning" (the same as what above is called a homograph).
The entry for homonym in The Encyclopaedia Britannica (14th Edition) states that homographs are "words spelt but not sounded alike", and homophones are "words alike only in sound [i.e. not alike in spelling]" (my italics and commentary).
The Encarta dictionary [4] defines heteronym as "each of two or more words that are spelled the same, but differ in meaning and often in pronunciation" (my italics). The "Fun with Words" website [5] says that a heteronym is "One of two (or more) words that have the same spelling, but different meaning, and sometimes different pronunciation too" (in other words, what we are calling homographs).

Homonym also has a specialised meaning in scientific nomenclature, described below. Homograph is sometimes used in typography as a synonym for homoglyph, and heteronym has a specialised meaning in poetry (see Heteronym (poetry)).

Further Examples

A further example of a homonym which is both a homophone and a homograph is fluke. Fluke is a fish, as well as a flatworm, the end parts of an anchor, the fins on a whale's tail, and a stroke of luck, all of which four separate lexemes with separate etymologies, share the one form, fluke. Similarly, a river bank, a savings bank, and a bank of switches share only a common spelling and pronunciation, but not meaning.

The first homonyms that one learns in English are probably the homophones to, too, and two, but the sentence "Too much to do in two days" would confuse no one. (Note, however, when read with a natural rhythm in many dialects, to has a schwa and is not homophonous with too or two.) There, their, and they're are familar examples, as are lead (the metal) and led (the verb past participle). Moped (the motorized bicycle) and moped (the past tense of mope) are examples of homographs; they are not homophones, because they are pronounced differently.

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 are pin and pen in many southern American accents, and merry, marry, and Mary in many western American accents. The pairs do, due and forward, foreword are homophonous in most American accents but not in most British accents. Similarly, the pairs talk, torque, and court, caught are distinguished in most dialects of American English, but are homophones in British English.

Homophones are sometimes used in message encryption to increase the difficulty in cracking the decryption code. In this case the clear text is altered prior to being encrypted and the decrypting party substitutes the homophones for their true meaning after decrypting the message

Many puns rely on homophones for their humor.

Homograph disambiguation is critically important in speech synthesis, natural language processing and other fields. See also polysemy for a closely related idea.

In scientific nomenclature

In scientific nomenclature, homonyms are scientific names that are identical in spelling but pertain to different organisms.

The rule of zoological nomenclature is that the first name to be published is valid (the senior homonym); any others are junior homonyms and must be replaced with new names. For example, Georges Cuvier proposed the genus Echidna in 1797 for the spiny anteater. However, Johann Reinhold Forster had published the name Echidna in 1777 for a genus of moray eels. Forster's use thus has priority, with Cuvier's being a junior homonym; Johann Karl Wilhelm Illiger published the replacement name Tachyglossus in 1811.

In botanical nomenclature the principle is much the same, the first published homonym is to be used. A later homonym is "illegitimate" and is not to be used unless conserved.

Quotation

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

Thomas Hood, "Faithless Sally Brown"

External links