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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).
Venn diagram showing the relationships between homographs (yellow) and related linguistic concepts. A homograph (from the Greek: ὁμός, homós 'same' and γράφω, gráphō 'write') is a word that shares the same written form as another word but has a different meaning. [1]
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").
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.
However, even at their best, they rarely catch all the errors in a text (such as homophone errors) and will flag neologisms and foreign words as misspellings. Nonetheless, spell checkers can be considered as a type of foreign language writing aid that non-native language learners can rely on to detect and correct their misspellings in the ...
"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.
It causes tire, tower, and tar to be homophones. The /aɪər/ – /ɑːr/ merger is found in some Midland and Southern U.S. accents. It causes tire and tar to be homophones. The cure–fir merger is a merger of /ʊər/ with /ɜːr/ or /ʊr/ with /ɜːr/ that occurs in East Anglian and American English in certain words.
The principle of a simple binary opposition between the two members of a minimal pair may be extended to cover a minimal set in which a number of words differ from one another in terms of one phone in a particular position in the word. [10]