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"Homophones" is a word game in which a player creates a sentence or phrase containing a pair or larger set of homophones, substitutes another (usually nonsensical) pair of words for the homophone pair, then reads the newly created sentence out loud. The object of the game is for the other players to deduce what the original homophone pair is.
aahed and odd; adieu and ado; ant and aunt; aural and oral; err becomes the same as ere, air and heir; marry and merry; rout and route; seated and seeded; shone and shown; tidal and title; trader and traitor
In practice, however, an optimal size for English appears to be around 90,000 entries. If there are more than this, incorrectly spelled words may be skipped because they are mistaken for others. For example, a linguist might determine on the basis of corpus linguistics that the word baht is more frequently a misspelling of bath or bat than a ...
For licence/license or practice/practise, formal British English also keeps the noun–verb distinction graphically (although phonetically the two words in each pair are homophones with - /s/ pronunciation). On the other hand, American English uses license and practice for both nouns and verbs (with - /s/ pronunciation in both cases too).
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 (/ h ə ˈ m ɒ f ən ə s /). Homophones that are spelled the same are both homographs and homonyms.
Homophones (literally "same sound") are usually defined as words that share the same pronunciation, regardless of how they are spelled. [ note 2 ] If they are spelled the same then they are also homographs (and homonyms); if they are spelled differently then they are also heterographs (literally "different writing").
Spelling is a set of conventions for written language regarding how graphemes should correspond to the sounds of spoken language. [1] Spelling is one of the elements of orthography, and highly standardized spelling is a prescriptive element. Spellings originated as transcriptions of the sounds of speech according to the alphabetic principle.
A less frequent practice is hypercorrection: substituting /w/ for /v/ in instances where the latter is actually correct. [ 46 ] In Hungarian phonology, in obstruent clusters, retrograde voicing assimilation occurs, [ 47 ] so voiced consonants change to their voiceless counterparts if a voiceless consonant follows them and voiceless consonants ...