All Topics  
Homophone

 

   Email Print
   Bookmark   Link






 

Homophone



 
 
A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning. The words may be spelled the same, such as rose
Rose

A rose is a perennial plant flower shrub or vine of the genus Rosa, within the family Rosaceae, that contains over 100 species and comes in a variety of colors....
 (flower) and rose (past tense of "rise"), or differently, such as carat
Carat (mass)

The carat is a unit of mass used for measuring gemstones and pearls . Currently a carat is defined as exactly 200 milligram . This definition, known as the metric carat, was adopted in 1907 at the Fourth General Conference on Weights and Measures, and soon afterwards in many countries around the world....
, caret
Caret

Caret, sometimes spelled phonetically, Carat, is the name for the symbol ^ in ASCII and some other character sets. Its Unicode code point is U+005E, and its ASCII code in hexadecimal is 5E....
, and carrot
Carrot

The carrot is a root vegetable, usually orange or white, or red-white blend in colour, with a crisp texture when fresh. The edible part of a carrot is a taproot....
, or to, two and too. A homophone is a type of homonym
Homonym

In linguistics, a homonym is one of a group of words that share the same spelling and the same pronunciation but have different meanings, usually as a result of the two words having different origins....
, although sometimes homonym is used to refer only to homophones that have the same spelling but different meanings.






Discussion
Ask a question about 'Homophone'
Start a new discussion about 'Homophone'
Answer questions from other users
Full Discussion Forum



Encyclopedia


A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning. The words may be spelled the same, such as rose
Rose

A rose is a perennial plant flower shrub or vine of the genus Rosa, within the family Rosaceae, that contains over 100 species and comes in a variety of colors....
 (flower) and rose (past tense of "rise"), or differently, such as carat
Carat (mass)

The carat is a unit of mass used for measuring gemstones and pearls . Currently a carat is defined as exactly 200 milligram . This definition, known as the metric carat, was adopted in 1907 at the Fourth General Conference on Weights and Measures, and soon afterwards in many countries around the world....
, caret
Caret

Caret, sometimes spelled phonetically, Carat, is the name for the symbol ^ in ASCII and some other character sets. Its Unicode code point is U+005E, and its ASCII code in hexadecimal is 5E....
, and carrot
Carrot

The carrot is a root vegetable, usually orange or white, or red-white blend in colour, with a crisp texture when fresh. The edible part of a carrot is a taproot....
, or to, two and too. A homophone is a type of homonym
Homonym

In linguistics, a homonym is one of a group of words that share the same spelling and the same pronunciation but have different meanings, usually as a result of the two words having different origins....
, although sometimes homonym is used to refer only to homophones that have the same spelling but different meanings. The term may also be used to apply to units shorter than words, such as letters or groups of letters that are pronounced the same as another letter or group of letters.

The Greek
Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
 prefix, homo- (?µ?-), means the "same", while phon? (f???) means "sound". Graph in homograph means "writing" (??af?).

In word play and games

Homophones are often used to create pun
Pun

A pun, or paronomasia, is a form of word play that deliberately exploits ambiguity between similar-sounding words for humour or rhetorical effect....
s and to deceive the reader (as in crossword puzzles
Crossword

A crossword is a word puzzle that normally takes the form of a square or rectangular grid of black and white squares. The goal is to fill the white squares with letters, forming words or phrases, by solving clues which lead to the answers....
) or to suggest multiple meanings. The last usage is common in poetry
Poetry

Poetry is a form of literature art in which language is used for its aesthetics and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning ....
 and creative literature
Literature

Literature is the art of written works. Literally translated, the word means "acquaintance with letters" . In Western culture the most basic written literary types include fiction and non-fiction....
. An example of this is seen in Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas

Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh people poet who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself....
's radio play Under Milk Wood: "The shops in mourning" where mourning can be heard as mourning or morning. Another vivid example is Thomas Hood
Thomas Hood

Thomas Hood was a United Kingdom humorist and poet. His son, Tom Hood, became a well known playwright and editor....
's use of 'birth' & 'berth' and "told' & 'toll'd' (tolled) in his poem "Faithless Sally Brown":

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.
In some accents, various sounds have merged
Phonemic differentiation

Phonemic differentiation is the phenomenon of a language maximizing the acoustic distance between its phonemes, presumably to minimize the possibility of misunderstanding....
 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
Minimal pair

In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, which differ in only one phonological element, such as a Phone , phoneme, toneme or chroneme and have a distinct meaning....
) are homophonous in the accent with the merger. Some examples from English
English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
 are:-
pin and pen in many southern American accents
Southern American English

Southern American English is a group of dialects of the English language spoken throughout the U.S. Southern states of the United States, from Southern and Eastern Maryland, West Virginia and Kentucky to the U.S....
.
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.
The pairs talk, torque, and court, caught are distinguished in rhotic
Rhotic and non-rhotic accents

English language pronunciation is divided into two main Accent groups: A rhotic speaker pronounces the letter R in hard or water. A non-rhotic speaker does not....
 accents such as Scottish English
Scottish English

Scottish English refers to the Variety of English language spoken in Scotland. It may or may not include Scots language depending on the observer....
 and most dialects of American English, but are homophones in many non-rhotic accents such as British Received Pronunciation
Received Pronunciation

Received Pronunciation is a form of pronunciation of the English language which has long been perceived as uniquely prestigious amongst British Accent ....
.


Homophones of multiple words or phrases (as sometimes seen in word game
Word game

Word games and puzzles are generally engaged as a source of Entertainment, but they have been found to serve a very useful and progressive Education purpose as well....
s) are also known as "oronyms". This term was coined by Gyles Brandreth
Gyles Brandreth

Gyles Daubeney Brandreth is an England author, ex-politician and media personality....
 and first published in his book The Joy of Lex (1980), and it was used in the BBC programme Never Mind the Full Stops, which also featured Brandreth as a guest.

Examples of "oronyms" (which may only be true homophones in certain dialects of English) include
"ice cream" vs. "I scream"
"euthanasia" vs. "youth in Asia"
"depend" vs. "deep end"
"the sky" vs. "this guy"
"four candles
Four candles

The Four Candles Sketch comedy, originally titled The Hardware Shop or Annie Finkhouse is a sketch from the BBC comedy The Two Ronnies....
" vs. "fork handles"
"Sand which is there" vs. "Sandwiches there"


In his Appalachian comedy routine, American comedian Jeff Foxworthy
Jeff Foxworthy

Jeff Foxworthy is an American stand-up comedian and actor. As a comedian, he is a member of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, a comedy troupe which also comprises Larry the Cable Guy, Bill Engvall, and Ron White....
 frequently uses oronyms which play on exaggerated 'country' accents. Notable examples include, "Initiate: My wife ate two sandwiches, initiate (and then she ate) a bag o' tater chips." and "Mayonnaise: Mayonnaise (Man, there is) a lot of people here tonight." Innuendo "Hey dude I saw a bird fly innuendo" (In your window)

Use in psychological research


Pseudo-homophones

Pseudo-homophones are non-words that are phonetically identical to a word. Pseudo-homophone pairs are pairs of phonetically identical letter strings where one string is a word and the other is a non-word. For example, groan/grone and crane/crain are pseudo-homophone pairs, whereas plane/plain is a homophone pair since both letter strings are recognised words. Both types of pairs are used in lexical decision task
Lexical decision task

The lexical decision task is a procedure used in many psychology and psycholinguistics experiments. The basic procedure involves measuring how quickly people classify stimuli as words or nonwords....
s to investigate word recognition.

Use as ambiguous information

Homophones where one spelling is of a threatening nature and one is not (e.g. slay/sleigh, war/wore) have been used in studies of anxiety
Anxiety

Anxiety is a psychological and physiological state characterized by cognitive, somatic, emotional, and behavioral components. These components combine to create an unpleasant feeling that is typically associated with uneasiness, fear, or worry....
 as a test of cognitive models that those with high anxiety tend to interpret ambiguous information in a threatening manner.

See also

  • dream pun
    Dream pun

    A dream pun is a pun that occurs in a dream. They are an important concept in dream interpretation. Following Freud, Ann Faraday's book The Dream Game included a chapter on "Punny Things in Dreams"....
    .


Wiktionary

  • List of dialect-independent homophones
  • List of dialect-dependent homophones