Homophone

From Citizendium
Revision as of 16:32, 13 March 2010 by imported>Ro Thorpe
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This article is a stub and thus not approved.
Main Article
Discussion
Related Articles  [?]
Bibliography  [?]
External Links  [?]
Citable Version  [?]
 
This editable Main Article is under development and subject to a disclaimer.

A homophone is a word that sounds exactly like another. 'Meat', referring to animal food, sounds exactly like 'meet', meaning 'come together'.

When homophones have the same spelling, they are also homonyms: the modal verb 'will' as in 'will they came?' sounds and also looks exactly like the noun 'will' as in 'having a strong will' or 'last will and testament'.

Words with the same spelling are called homographs, but they are not all homophones: some have different pronunciations, as with the verb 'to tear', meaning 'to rip', and 'tear', as in 'tearful'[1]. Thus homonyms are homophonic homographs.

References

  1. In the notation used at English spellings, téar rip and têar cry