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A thing that makes me
angry is when people confuse homophones and homonyms. I
mean, on the Great Scale of Things That Are Wrong With
This World I guess it’s minor, but then again, so
is, I don’t know, the stock market. If you really
think about it. But if you’re the kind of person who
really thinks about things, you might realize that the
suffix –phone means “sound,” and the
prefix homo- means “same,” so homophones have
the same sound. The suffix –nym, on the other hand,
sounds an awful lot like the word name, which might
indicate to the thinking person that homonyms have the
same “name,” or spelling.
So once and for all, words are homophones if:
1. The words are spelled differently.
2. The words have different meanings.
3. The words sound the same.
A word like pelt is not a homophone. It has more than
one meaning, but it is always spelled p-e-l-t.
Pelt: the skin of an animal. “I wore a lovely
pelt yesterday.”
Pelt: to throw things. “I had some cream pies, and I
pelted a fur-wearing bitch yesterday.”
Homonyms bore me.
Homophones do not.
When I was in fifth grade I collected lists of
homophones in a spiral notebook, hundreds and hundreds of
them, and this was not an assignment, this was just what
I did for fun, and everyone always laughed at me and I
felt very alone. Eventually I gave my homophone notebook
to my teacher and she asked if I was trying to get extra
credit and I said no, I was just proud of it, and she
looked at me with a kind of pity I knew I had to get used
to seeing.
Here are thirty-six of my favorite homophones.
away, aweigh
boar, bore, Bohr*
bread, bred
caught, cot
creak, creek
dew, do, due
doe, d’oh!, dough **
gait, gate
groan, grown
him, hymn
lam, lamb
licker, likker, liquor ***
links, lynx
loam, loom ****
locks, lox
mail, male
might, mite
missed, mist
ode, owed
pea, pee
pedal, peddle
pi, pie
place, plaice *****
quarts, quartz
reek, wreak
right, rite, write, wright
role, roll
rye, wry
sink, sync
slay, sleigh
soar, sore
team, teem
thyme, time
wait, weight
whit, wit
yoke, yolk
*Niels Bohr was a Danish physicist who won a Nobel
prize for his theories about the structure of atoms.
Niels Bohr is known for saying that “the opposite of
a correct statement is a false statement, but the
opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound
truth,” which I think was a nice thing to say.
**Thanks to Matt Groening for making this homophone
pair a triplet.
***Likker comes in jugs or plastic containers, or is
made in a bathtub. Liquor is expensive, comes in glass
containers, and is for fancy-type people. Therefore these
words satisfy Homophone Requirement #2.
****Many people outside New England pronounce loam
loahm, not loom. Many people outside New England also
think it’s okay to make lobster rolls on brioche.
What is wrong with you people?
*****It’s a kind of fish. Look it up.
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