Homonyms and their Ilk

Homonyms are words that are pronounced the same, but have different meanings. From days of yore, the danger with homonyms is that your spell checker won’t warn you about them; you have to know what you’re writing about. (You saw the three homonyms in that last sentence, didn’t you?)

I suppose the real danger is that you appear to be a doofus if you use the wrong word. Technically, if they are spelled differently but pronounced the same, they’re homophones. Here are a few I have seen in the wild:

• he—third person singular masculine pronoun
  hee—a type of laugh, often with tee or another hee
• peek—to look at something surreptitiously
  peak—the top of a mountain
• they’re, their, there—I don’t need to define these, do I?
• discrete—separate
  discreet—showing good sense

True homonyms are both spelled and pronounced the same, but they are different words, not just different meanings of the same word, though they’re often treated that way.

• bark—what a dog says, from Old English word for break. When your drill sergeant barks an order, it’s this word.
  bark—outside of a tree, from Old Norse for tree skin. When you bark your shin, it’s the verb form of this word.
• fold—where you put sheep, from Old English falaed
  fold—what you’re supposed to do to a shirt, map, or egg whites, also from Old English, folden
• Google “homonym” for more examples than you’ll ever need.

Then we have the occasional words that are spelled alike but pronounced differently and have different meanings. These are homographs. Well, also called heteronyms, depending on whether you care about the spelling or the pronunciation. In English you can change a lot of words from noun to verb by changing the accent.

• contest—a competition
  contest—to dispute an outcome
• row—in a nice line
  row—(pronounced raow)—a disorderly fight
• use—(pronounced uze) to employ something such as a tool
  use—(pronounced usse) why you employ something
• used—(pronounced yusst) an auxiliary verb; “we used to go camping”
  used—(pronounced uzed) past tense of use; “we used a tent whenever we went”

Do you have any favorites that people get wrong? Feel free to share in the comments.

PS—I ran into this Buckles after I wrote this post, but since it has one of today’s words in it…