Homophones

Search for homophones here. Homophones are words that sound the same (or very nearly the same) but are spelled differently.

One Keyword (like there or hey): Required   

About Homophones

This is a list of homophones in "General American English". It is based on the book Handbook of Homophones by William Cameron Townsend, 1975. For the purpose at hand, the list contains words that sound the same (or very nearly the same) but are spelled differently. Thus the list includes "bear" and "bare" but not "bear" (noun) and "bear" (verb). However, the list does occasionally include spelling variants of the same word when there is another word in the same entry; for instance, "ax,axe,acts" is in the list but not "blessed,blest".(Note that the only difference between "homophones" and "spelling variant" is whether or not the words are lexically "the same".) Obviously, the determination of what counts as sounding the "same" depends on the dialect of the speaker. Some of the entries in this homophones list may be homophones in my speech but not yours (for instance, "awed" and "odd".

The designation "General American English" should be sufficient to disallow strong regional dialects (in the south, "tire" and "tar" can be homophones!) while allowing for some minor variation. For instance, there are entries for "cot,caught" and "marry,merry,Mary". The homophones list contains a few proper names, which are capitalized; e.g. "Pete" and "peat". This is useful as long as proper names are limited to common ones. (Proper names that differ only in case from common nouns are not included, e.g. "bill,"Bill".) If any and all proper names were fair game, I fear we would be off and running (how about "Malays" and "malaise"?).

List of Homophones