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Most of the pairs listed below are closely related: for example, "absent" as a noun meaning "missing", and as a verb meaning "to make oneself missing". There are also many cases in which homographs are of an entirely separate origin, or whose meanings have diverged to the point that present-day speakers have little historical understanding: for ...
Many words (spelled correctly) are confused with another word which sounds the same or is spelled similarly. These are known as homophones. This list does not include place names, such as Gaul (gall) or Greece (grease).
This is a list of British English words that have different American English spellings, for example, colour (British English) and color (American English). Word pairs are listed with the British English version first, in italics, followed by the American English version: spelt, spelled; Derived words often, but not always, follow their root.
This list does not include place names in the United Kingdom or the United States, or places following spelling conventions of non-English languages.For UK place names, see List of irregularly spelled places in the United Kingdom.
However, these were generally much better guides to the then-pronunciation than modern English spelling is. [opinion] For example, /ʌ/, normally written u , is spelled with an o in one, some, love, etc., due to Norman spelling conventions which prohibited writing u before m, n, v due to the graphical confusion that would result.
Today's British English spellings mostly follow Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), while many American English spellings follow Webster's An American Dictionary of the English Language ("ADEL", "Webster's Dictionary", 1828). [2] Webster was a proponent of English spelling reform for reasons both philological and nationalistic.
A homophone (/ ˈ h ɒ m ə f oʊ n, ˈ h oʊ m ə-/) 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 (flower) and rose (past tense of "rise"), or spelled differently, as in rain, reign, and rein.
Here confusion is not possible in spoken language but could occur in written language. bear (verb) – to support or carry; bear (noun) – the animal. where the words are homonyms, identical in spelling and pronunciation (/ b ɛər /), but different in meaning and grammatical function. The above examples are of etymologically unrelated words