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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.
Homographs are words with the same spelling but having more than one meaning. Homographs may be pronounced the same (), or they may be pronounced differently (heteronyms, also known as heterophones).
Reed–Kellogg diagram of the sentence. The sentence is unpunctuated and uses three different readings of the word "buffalo". In order of their first use, these are: a. a city named Buffalo. This is used as a noun adjunct in the sentence; n. the noun buffalo, an animal, in the plural (equivalent to "buffaloes" or "buffalos"), in order to avoid ...
Demonstrations of sentences which are unlikely to have ever been said, although the combinatorial complexity of the linguistic system makes them possible. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously (Noam Chomsky): example that is grammatically correct but based on semantic combinations that are contradictory and therefore would not normally occur.
A major sentence is a regular sentence; it has a subject and a predicate, e.g. "I have a ball." In this sentence, one can change the persons, e.g. "We have a ball." However, a minor sentence is an irregular type of sentence that does not contain a main clause, e.g. "Mary!", "Precisely so.", "Next Tuesday evening after it gets dark."
The active voice is the most commonly used in many languages and represents the "normal" case, in which the subject of the verb is the agent. In the active voice, the subject of the sentence performs the action or causes the happening denoted by the verb. Sentence (1) is in active voice, as indicated by the verb form saw.
"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.
Sometimes everyday speakers of English change counterintuitive spellings, with the new spellings usually not judged to be entirely correct. However, such forms may gain acceptance if used enough. An example is the word miniscule , which still competes with its original spelling of minuscule , though this might also be because of analogy with ...