Grammar Tips - Homonyms

LEARN ABOUT HOMONYMS

WITH EXAMPLES

GRAMMARLY BLOG

Parker Yamasaki

Updated on Jan. 5, 2023

The ENGLISH language loves to recycle its words. A bat is both a flying mammal and a smooth wooden club used to hit baseballs. Park can mean “a grassy expanse” or “a way to position a car”. And rock is both a mineral and a music genre. All of these words are homonyms, words with the same spelling or pronunciation but with different meanings. While homonyms occasionally cause confusion, they can also make writing more rhythmic or playful. With homonyms, you can write the sentence:

• I could barely bear to watch the bear bare its teeth.

…and it will make perfect grammatical sense.

What is a homonym?
The definition of a homonym is “one of two or more words spelled and pronounced alike but different in meaning”. Just to confuse things a little more, homonyms can be broken down into two categories: homophones and homographs.
The name comes from the Greek homōnymon (the neuter of homōnymos), which means “having the same name”. The Greek prefix homo- means “same”, while the suffix –nym means “name”. Understanding these roots also gives us insight into the subcategories homophone (homo means “same”; phone means “voice or sound”), and homograph (graph from grapho, which means “write”). More on those differences next.

What are the differences between homonyms, homophones, and homographs?
Homonyms, homophones, and homographs, oh my! The three terms are closely related but don’t mean the same thing (are you beginning to see a pattern here?).

Homonyms
Homonym is the umbrella term for words with any combination of the same spelling or sound but with different meanings. Whether a word is a homophone, homograph, or both, it is always a homonym. That one’s easy.

Homophones
These are words that sound the same but have different meanings. For example, the most common homophones taught in school are: there / their / they’re and to / too / two. These sets of words have the same pronunciation but different meanings and uses. Other examples of homophones are: rows / rose, one / won, and build / billed.

Homographs
Homographs are words that are spelled the same but have different meanings.
For example, the word lead (meaning “to be in charge of”; rhymes with bead) and lead (meaning “a toxic metal”; rhymes with bed) look the same but are pronounced differently and have different meanings.
Some words have the same spelling and pronunciation, like the word bear. Bear as a verb means “to carry”, while bear as a noun means “a furry, lumbering mammal”. Words like this can be considered both homophones and homographs — at which point, it’s probably easier to just call them homonyms.

How to use homonyms in writing
Be clear about context: Homonyms rely on context to make sense. It’s unlikely that a reader will be unclear about the meaning of the word spring if you’ve just described the pleasant temperature and the first few flowers starting to bloom. But if the scene is about jumping on a trampoline during this delightful shoulder season, then the use of spring might need some clarification. Use context to clarify confusing words for your reader.
Use homonyms playfully: Writers can harness the fun of homonyms to create wordplay and puns. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, is full of purposely misunderstood homonyms. In fact, homonyms make up the majority of the story’s humor. Homonyms also make great double entendres, which is the deliberate use of a word with multiple meanings.
Don’t forget the apostrophe: Many commonly used contractions are homonyms. They’re, you’re, and it’s are homonyms of their, your, and its. If you understand the rules of apostrophes, then you don’t have to worry about using the wrong word. A similar thing happens with possessive words, which become homonyms with their plurals. For example, cats means “multiple felines”, while cat’s means “something that belongs to a single cat”.
Homonyms can be confusing, especially when you’re just getting started writing. If you’re unsure about which word fits, you can always check with Grammarly.

Homonym examples
Homonyms are related either by sound (homophones) or by spelling (homographs). Below are examples of homophones and homographs, but keep in mind that all of these are examples of homonyms.

Homophone examples

Mercutio: Nay, gentle Romeo, we must have you dance.
Romeo: Not I, believe me. You have dancing shoes. With nimble soles; I have a soul of lead. So stakes me to the ground I cannot move… (Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare)

I always told you, Gwendolen, my name was Ernest, didn’t I? Well, it is Ernest after all. I mean it naturally is Ernest.
On the contrary, Aunt Augusta, I’ve now realized for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest […] (The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde)

“I beg your pardon,” said Alice very humbly: “you had got to the fifth bend, I think?”
“I had not!” cried the Mouse, sharply and very angrily.
“A knot!” said Alice, always ready to make herself useful, and looking anxiously about her. “Oh, do let me help to undo it!” (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll)

Homograph examples

• Inside, the blinds were drawn, but the furniture was real. (Private Eye, Spike Milligan)
• Ask for me tomorrow, and you will find me a grave man. (Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare)

Homonym FAQs

What is a homonym?
A homonym is a word in a set of words that are spelled or sound the same but have different meanings.

What’s the difference between homonyms, homographs, and homophones?
Homographs are words that have the same spelling but different meanings. Homophones are words with the same pronunciation but with different meanings. Homonyms are any words that are spelled or sound the same with different meanings; homonym is an umbrella term for both homographs and homophones.

What are some examples of homonyms?

• Bat (flying mammal / baseball equipment)
• Bow (knot tied with two loops / weapon to shoot arrows / bend at the hips / front end of a ship)
• Ring (a circle / a circular piece of jewelry / a sound)
• Wind (blowing air / to tire out / to move in along a nonlinear course / to turn)
• Letter (a character representing a sound / a piece of written correspondence)
• Nail (a small metal spike / a hard covering at the end of a finger)
• Rose (a type of flower / a pink color / to move in an upward direction)
• Park (a public green area / putting a vehicle in a position where the wheels no longer move)
• Palm (a type of tree / the center of the inner surface of a hand / to conceal)
• Bear / bare
• Your / you’re
• There / their / they’re
• To / too / two

Adapted from: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/writing-tips/homonyms/. Accessed on October 3, 2024. © 2024 Grammarly Inc. All rights reserved.

Grammar Tips - Homophones

WHAT ARE HOMOPHONES?

GRAMMARLY BLOG

Lindsay Kramer

Updated on Apr. 27, 2021

Homophones are words that are pronounced the same way but have different meanings. Sometimes they’re spelled identically and sometimes they aren’t.
When you’re learning a new language, homophones can be tricky. They can even be confusing if you’re a primary speaker of a language, especially when you’re writing. Read on to learn more about homophones, commonly confused homophones, and how to be a homophone pro.

Types of homophones
Not all homophones are the same. When two words sound the same, but are spelled differently and have different meanings, they are known as homonyms. For example, “knead” and “need” are homonyms as well as homophones.
Homophones can be further classified as homographs and heterographs.
Homographs are words that are spelled the same way, could be pronounced differently, and have different meanings. For example, “hail”, as in “I’ll hail a taxi”, and “hail”, as in “I got stuck in the hail”, are homographs, as are “bow” as in “I’ll tie the ribbon in a bow” and “bow” as in “take a bow after you perform the song.”
Heterographs are words that are spelled differently and have different meanings, but are still pronounced the same way. “Flower” and “flour” are examples of heterographs.
In contrast, heteronyms are words that are spelled the same, but pronounced differently and have different meanings. An example is “tear”, as in “he had a tear in his eye”, and “tear”, as in “please tear up the paper”.
And then there are oronyms, a category of phrases that is sometimes grouped with homophones. Like homophones, oronyms sound the same, but they have different meanings — and they don’t always sound identical. “World peace” and “whirled peas” are examples of oronyms.
There is also a category known as pseudo-homophones. These are pairs of words that sound identical, but one of the words is not an actual, recognized word. An example of a pair of pseudo-homophones is groan and grone (“grone” is an obsolete form of “groan”). Pseudo-homophones are more esoteric, as they’re typically used in lexical decision tasks to measure how quickly a study participant recognizes a word during psychology and psycholinguistic studies.
Synophones are words that sound almost, but not quite, the same and have different meanings. Assure, ensure, and insure are synophones, for example.

Commonly confused homophones
Because they sound the same, it can be easy to get homophones mixed up and use the wrong one in your writing. Below are a few of the most commonly confused homophones in ENGLISH:

THEN / THAN
Then is an adverb used to describe where something fits into a series of events:

We ate dinner, then we went mini-golfing.

Than is a conjunction or preposition used to compare two things:

My dog is bigger than his dog.

TO / TOO / TWO
Three commonly confused English homophones are to, too, and two.
To is a preposition, infinitive marker, or an adverb that indicates movement or that the verb being used is in the infinitive form:

They went to the mall.
I’d like to order a pizza.

Too is an adverb and can indicate that something is excessive or that something is happening in addition to another thing:

The music was way too loud.
My sister wanted some candy too.

Two is the number that falls between one and three:

So I brought my sister two packs of gummy worms.

THERE / THEIR / THEY’RE
Three other commonly confused English homophones are there, their, and they’re.
There is an adverb that describes a location or position:

I’m excited to visit New York again, as I haven’t been there in almost a year.

Their is a possessive pronoun:

The students voted for Disney World as their graduation trip.

They’re is a contraction of the words “they” and “are”:

The park is overrun with ducks — they’re everywhere!

YOUR / YOU’RE
Your is a pronoun that shows possession:

I’ve never been to your house.

You’re is a contraction of the words you and are:

You’re invited to my birthday party next week.

More of the most common English homophones:

• affect / effect
• bail / bale
• bark / bark
• be / bee
• bear / bare
• brake / break
• by / buy
• carrot / caret / carat
• complement / compliment
• discreet / discrete
• here / hear
• illicit / elicit
• led / lead
• principle / principal
• seal / seal
• sight / site / cite
• waist / waste
• week / weak
• whether / weather / wether
• whole / hole

Why do languages have homophones?
There are a few different reasons why languages have homophones. Some languages have significantly fewer phonetic syllables than others and this limited syllable set makes homophones almost inevitable. Chinese is one such family of languages, and with Chinese dialects’ emphasis on context, homophones play an important role in communication and understanding.
In other languages, such as English, homophones largely stem from words’ pronunciations changing over time. All languages evolve as people migrate, mesh with new cultures, develop new technology and new needs, and integrate new languages with their own. Languages evolve into distinct regional dialects as well and sometimes, words that are homophones in one dialect aren’t homophones in another. One example of this in US English are the words “marry”, “merry”, and “Mary”. In some parts of the US, these three words sound the same and in others, they have distinct pronunciations.
Many of today’s homophones didn’t start out as homophones. One example of English homophones that were initially pronounced differently is knight and night. The word “knight” was spelled “cniht” in Old English and it was related to the Dutch word “knecht”, both of which pronounce the letter “k” at the beginning of the word. “Night”, on the other hand, evolved from the Old English “neaht” and “niht”. Following the Norman Invasion and English’s shift away from its Germanic roots, the pronounced “k” sound began to drift away, leaving us with a silent letter at the beginning of the word “knight”. Other words, like “knot”, “knife”, and “knit”, followed a similar progression as English evolved from a strictly Germanic language to one with significant Latin influences.

How are homophones used?
Nearly every language has homophones. From language to language, how they work — and their cultural significance — varies. In many languages, homophones are a key part of puns and other types of wordplay.
Here’s an example:

What do you call a piece of wood that has nothing to do?
Board.
Get it? The piece of wood is a board and, because it has nothing to do, it’s bored.

The joke isn’t so funny written out like this, but it at least garners a groan when spoken aloud. And the very thing that makes it amusing is the thing that makes it and similar jokes tough for new language learners: the homophone. Beyond grasping humor, homophones can make it difficult for multilingual speakers to grasp nuance when speaking, listening, and writing.
If you’re having a conversation or reading text in a new language and a word sounds out of place, it might be a homophone. Ask the speaker or sender to clarify the word or take a moment to look it up. Mastering a new language’s homophones can be a lengthy, complicated process, but it’s a key part of developing true fluency in a new language.

Adapted from: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/commonly-confused-words/homophones/. Accessed on October 3, 2024. © 2024 Grammarly Inc. All rights reserved.

Grammar Tips - Homographs

WHAT IS A HOMOGRAPH?

DEFINITION AND EXAMPLES

GRAMMARLY BLOG

Updated on Dec. 15, 2023

The ENGLISH language is riddled with homographs — words that are spelled the same way but differ in meaning and/or pronunciation or origin. As a matter of fact, riddle is one of them: there’s the transitive verb, meaning “to poke holes into something”, and the noun, which refers to an enigma or a puzzle.
Fortunately, telling these tricksters apart is easier than you might expect — the words surrounding a homograph usually provide context clues, making it clear which meaning the writer intends to communicate. But there are still things to watch out for: the word homograph is awfully similar to homophone and homonym, the names for two related — but different — ambiguities in the language. We’ll get into the distinctions below.

What is a homograph?
A homograph (pronounced HAH-muh-graf) is a pair or group of words that have the same spelling but differ in meaning and sometimes pronunciation or origin. The prefix homo- comes from the Greek word for “same”, and graph comes from the Greek word for “writing”; homographs are written — spelled — the same way.
Sometimes, these words sound different when spoken:

• bass /bæs/: a type of fish
• bass /beɪs/: a musical instrument

Sometimes, they sound the same:

• ring: jewelry worn on a finger
• ring: call someone on the phone

Sometimes they look and sound identical but are derived from completely different roots. The two senses of riddle that we identified at the beginning of this post are just such a case. The verb that means “to pierce something with many holes” or “completely pervade something” comes to us from a Proto-Indo-European root word for sifting something with a tool like a sieve, while the noun referring to an enigma or a puzzle comes via an Old English word that means “to interpret or decode” — and is also the source of the word read.

Homographs versus homonyms and homophones
Not only do the terms homograph, homophone, and homonym begin with the same prefix, their meanings also overlap and are sometimes contested.
We’ve already seen that a homograph is a word that is spelled the same as another word but has a different meaning and may have a different pronunciation. A homophone (meaning “same sound”) is a word that is pronounced identically to another word but has a different meaning and may have a different spelling.
The words bow (a bending of the body to show respect) and bow (the front of a boat) are both homophones and homographs because they are spelled and pronounced identically – /baƱ/. The word bow (the weapon that shoots an arrow) is a homograph of the other two words but not a homophone because it is pronounced differently – /boƱ/.
In the broadest definition, homonym (“same name”) is an umbrella term for words with the same spelling or sound but different meanings, which means homographs and homophones are types of homonyms. In the common set of homonyms their/they’re/there, all three words are homophones in addition to being homonyms; none of them are homographs.

Homograph examples

Common homographs that are also homophones

• band (group of people) / band (strap)
• bat (flying mammal) / bat (sports equipment)
• bear (large mammal) / bear (to carry)
• can (to be able) / can (metal food container)
• class (instructional course) / class (sophistication)
• crane (wading bird) / crane (lifting machine)
• fair (equitable) / fair (carnival)
• fan (air-blowing appliance) / fan (admirer)
• kind (sympathetic, helpful) / kind (type)
• lean (having little fat) / lean (to rest against something)
• novel (new, unique) / novel (fictional book)
• park (outdoor recreational space) / park (to bring a vehicle to a stop)
• part (component) / part (to separate)
• pen (writing implement) / pen (small enclosure)
• watch (time-telling jewelry) / watch (to observe)

Common homographs with different pronunciations

• attribute (characteristic) / attribute (to give credit)
• close (nearby) / close (to shut)
• console (cabinet) / console (to comfort)
• content (satisfied) / content (material contained)
• entrance (way to enter) / entrance (to enchant)
• lead (soft, heavy metal) / lead (to head up)
• minute (sixty seconds) / minute (very small)
• object (item) / object (to protest)
• Polish (from Poland) / polish (to make smooth and shiny)
• present (gift) / present (to show)
• produce (fruit and vegetables) / produce (to bring into existence)
• subject (topic) / subject (to bring under control of something)
• tear (drop of fluid from the eye) / tear (to rip)
• wind (movement of air) / wind (to turn something around something else)
• wound (injury that breaks the skin) / wound (past tense of wind)

Homograph FAQs

What is a homograph?
A homograph is one of two or more words that are spelled the same but differ in meaning and may also differ in pronunciation or origin.

How are homographs different from homonyms?
In the loosest definition of homonym, a homonym is a word with the same spelling or sound but a different meaning from another word. A homograph is a type of homonym that has the same spelling as the other word but a different meaning.

How are homographs different from homophones?
Homophones are a type of homonym that is pronounced the same as another word but has a different meaning, whereas homographs are spelled the same as another word, have a different meaning, and may have a different pronunciation. Some words are both homographs and homophones.

Adapted from: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/grammar/homograph/. Accessed on October 3, 2024. © 2024 Grammarly Inc. All rights reserved.

ENGLISH ATPC EFAPE - 2024

LÍNGUA INGLESA - 7º ano, aula 7

UNSUNG HEROES (PART 1)

Ensino Fundamental - Anos Finais

3º bimestre

ATPC de Língua Inglesa para os anos finais do Ensino Fundamental, conduzida pela professora Claudia Almeida Fornaciari, formadora da EFAPE (Escola de Formação e Aperfeiçoamento dos Profissionais da Educação). O tema abordado é “Unsung Heroes (Part 1)”, referente à aula 7 de Inglês, 7º ano, 3º bimestre.

O objetivo dessa formação, gravada em 4 de setembro de 2024, é:

• refletir sobre a dinâmica do material digital.

O material desta ATPC pode ser baixado AQUI.

ENGLISH ATPC EFAPE - 2024

LÍNGUA INGLESA - 1ª série EM

RETOMADA

EF (Education First) Platform - SPeak

Ensino Médio - 3º bimestre

ATPC de Língua Inglesa para o Ensino Médio, conduzida pela professora Claudia Almeida Fornaciari, formadora da EFAPE (Escola de Formação e Aperfeiçoamento dos Profissionais da Educação). O tema da aula abordado é uma retomada do que foi estudado na 1ª série EM, no 3º bimestre, com base no material digital das “aulas espelhadas” com a Plataforma EF (Education First) - SPeak.

O objetivo dessa formação, gravada em 9 de setembro de 2024, é:

• revisar o conteúdo das aulas espelhadas do 3º bimestre.

O material desta ATPC pode ser baixado AQUI.