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Homophone
A homophone is a word that is
pronounced the same (to varying extent)
as another word but differs in meaning. A
homophone may also differ in spelling.
The two words may be spelled the same,
such as rose (flower) and rose (past tense
of "rise"), or differently, such as carat,
caret, and carrot, or to, two, and too. The
term "homophone" may also apply to
units longer or shorter than words, such
as phrases, letters, or groups of letters
which are pronounced the same as
another phrase, letter, or group of letters.
Homophones that are spelled the same are
also both homographs and homonyms. [1] Venn diagram showing the relationships between homophones (blue
line) and related linguistic concepts
Homophones that are spelled differently
are also called heterographs. A word or
unit with this property is said to be "homophonous".
Contents
Etymology
1
In wordplay and games
2
Oronyms
2.1
Number of homophones
3
English
3.1
Japanese
3.2
Korean
3.3
Use in psychological research
4
Pseudohomophones
4.1
Use as ambiguous information
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4.2
Bibliography
5
See also
6
References
7
External links
8
Etymology
"Homophone" derives from the Greek homo (ὁμο‑), "same", and phōnḗ (φωνή), "voice, utterance".
In wordplay and games
Homophones are often used to create puns and to deceive the reader (as
in crossword puzzles) or to suggest multiple meanings. The last usage is
common in poetry and creative literature. An example of this is seen in
Dylan Thomas's radio play Under Milk Wood: "The shops in mourning"
where mourning can be heard as mourning or morning. Another vivid
example is Thomas Hood's use of "birth" and "berth" and "told" and
"toll'd" (tolled) in his poem "Faithless Sally Brown":
His death, which happen'd in his berth,
A sign reads, "Trespassers
At fortyodd befell:
will be shot on site [sic]." Note that
They went and told the sexton, and
"site" is a homophone of "sight".
The sexton toll'd the bell.
In some accents, various sounds have merged in that they are no longer
distinctive, and thus words that differ only by those sounds in an accent that maintains the distinction (a minimal
pair) are homophonous in the accent with the merger. Some examples from English are:
pin and pen in many southern American accents.
merry, marry, and Mary in most American accents.
The pairs do, due and forward, foreword are homophonous in most American accents but
not in most English accents.
The pairs talk, torque, and court, caught are distinguished in rhotic accents such as
Scottish English and most dialects of American English, but are homophones in many non
rhotic accents such as British Received Pronunciation.
Wordplay is particularly common in English because the multiplicity of linguistic influences offers considerable
complication in spelling and meaning and pronunciation compared with other languages.
Malapropisms, which often create a similar comic effect, are usually nearhomophones. See also Eggcorn.
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Oronyms
Homophones of multiple words or phrases (as sometimes seen in word games) are also known as "oronyms". This
term was coined by Gyles Brandreth and first published in his book The Joy of Lex (1980), and it was used in the
BBC programme Never Mind the Full Stops, which also featured Brandreth as a guest.
Examples of "oronyms" (which may only be true homophones in certain dialects of English) include:
"ice cream" vs. "I scream" (as in the popular song "I scream. You scream. We all scream
for ice cream.")
"euthanasia" vs. "Youth in Asia"
"depend" vs. "deep end"
"Gemini" vs. "Jim and I" vs. "Jem in eye"
"the sky" vs. "this guy" (most notably as a mondegreen in Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix)
"four candles" vs. "fork handles"
"sand which is there" vs. "sandwiches there"
"philanderer" vs. "Flanders"
"example" vs. "egg sample"
"some others" vs. "some mothers" vs. "smothers"
"minute" vs. "my newt"
"vodka" vs. "Ford Ka"
"foxhole" vs. "Vauxhall"
"big hand" vs. "began"
"Mégane" vs. "Meg's hand"
"real eyes" vs. "realize" vs. "real lies"
"a dressed male" vs. "addressed mail"
"them all" vs. "the mall"
In his Appalachian comedy routine, American comedian Jeff Foxworthy frequently uses oronyms which play on
exaggerated "country" accents. Notable examples include:
Initiate: "My wife ate two sandwiches, initiate [and then she ate] a bag o' tater chips."
Mayonnaise: "Mayonnaise [Man, there is] a lot of people here tonight."
Innuendo: "Hey dude I saw a bird fly innuendo [in your window]."
Moustache: "I Moustache [must ask] you a question."
Number of homophones
English
There are sites, for example,
https://web.archive.org/web/20160825095711/http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/fun/wordplay/multinyms.html,
which have lists of homonyms or rather homophones and even 'multinyms' which have as many as seven spellings.
There are differences in such lists due to dialect pronunciations and usage of old words. In English, there are
approximately 88 triples; 24 quadruples; 2 quintuples; 1 sextet and 1 septet. The septet is:
raise, rays, rase, raze, rehs, res, réis
Other than the three common words (raise, rays and raze), there are:
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rase – a verb meaning "to erase";
rehs – the plural of reh, a mixture of sodium salts found as an efflorescence in India;
res – the plural of re, a name for one step of the musical scale;
réis – the plural of real, a currency unit of Portugal and Brazil.
If proper names are allowed then a nonet is Ayr (Scottish town), Aire (Yorkshire River), Eyre (legal term and various
geographic locations), heir, air, err (some speakers), ere (poetic "before"), e'er (poetic "ever", some speakers), are
(unit of area; some speakers).
Japanese
There are a large number of homophones in Japanese, due to the use of SinoJapanese vocabulary, where borrowed
words and morphemes from Chinese are widely used in Japanese, but many sound differences, such as tones, are
lost. These are to some extent disambiguated via Japanese pitch accent, or from context, but many of these words
are primarily or almost exclusively used in writing, where they are easily distinguished as they are written with
different kanji; others are used for puns, which are frequent in Japanese. An extreme example is kikō, which is the
pronunciation of at least 22 words (some quite rare or specialized, others common; all these examples are two
character compounds), including: 機構 (organization/mechanism), 紀行 (travelogue), 稀覯 (rare), 騎行 (horseback
riding), 貴校 ((school (respectful)), 奇功 (outstanding achievement), 貴公 (word for "you" used by men addressing
male equals or inferiors), 起稿 (draft), 奇行 (eccentricity), 機巧 (contrivance), 寄港 (stopping at port), 帰校 (returning
to school), 気功 (breathing exercise/qigong), 寄稿 (contribute an article/written piece), 機甲 (armor, e.g. of a tank),
帰航 (homeward voyage), 奇効 (remarkable effect), 季候 (season/climate), 気孔 (stoma), 起工 (setting to work), 気候
(climate), 帰港 (returning to port).
Korean
The Korean language contains a combination of words that strictly belong to Korean and words that are loanwords
from Chinese. Due to Chinese being pronounced with varying tones and Korean's removal of those tones, and
because the modern Korean writing system, Hangeul, has a more finite number of phonemes than, for example,
Latinderived alphabets such as English's, there is a large number of homonyms with both same spelling and
pronunciation. For example, '화장(化粧)하다': 'to put on makeup' and '화장(火葬)하다': 'to cremate'. Also, '유산(遺
産)': 'inheritance' and '유산(流産)': 'miscarriage'. '방구': 'fart', and '방구(防具)': 'guard'. There are heterographs, but
far fewer, contrary to the tendency in English. For example, '학문(學問)': 'learning', and '항문(肛門)': 'anus'. Using
hanja (한자,漢字), which are Chinese characters, such words are written differently.
Implicit above, like in other languages, Korean homonyms can be used to make puns. The context in which the word
is used indicates which meaning is intended by the speaker or writer.
Use in psychological research
Pseudohomophones
Pseudohomophones are pseudowords that are phonetically identical to a word. For example, groan/grone and
crane/crain are pseudohomophone pairs, whereas plane/plain is a homophone pair since both letter strings are
recognised words. Both types of pairs are used in lexical decision tasks to investigate word recognition. [2]
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Use as ambiguous information
Homophones, specifically heterographs, where one spelling is of a threatening nature and one is not (e.g.
slay/sleigh, war/wore) have been used in studies of anxiety as a test of cognitive models that those with high anxiety
tend to interpret ambiguous information in a threatening manner. [3]
Bibliography
Franklyn, Julian (1966). Which Witch? (1st ed.). New York: Dorset Press. ISBN 0880291648.
See also
Heterography and homography
Heteronym (linguistics)
Dajare, a type of wordplay involving similarsounding phrases
Perfect rhyme
Wiktionary
List of dialectindependent homophones
List of dialectdependent homophones
References
1. According to the strict sense of homonyms as words with the same spelling and pronunciation; however,
homonyms according to the loose sense common in nontechnical contexts are words with the same spelling or
pronunciation, in which case all homophones are also homonyms. Random House Unabridged Dictionary entry
for "homonym" (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/homonym?r=66) at Dictionary.com
2. Martin, R. C. (1982). The pseudohomophone effect: The role of visual similarity in nonword decisions. Quarterly
Journal of Experimental Psychology, 34A, 395409.
3. Mogg K, Bradley BP, Miller T, Potts H, Glenwright J, Kentish J (1994). Interpretation of homophones related to
threat: Anxiety or response bias effects? Cognitive Therapy and Research, 18(5), 46177
External links
Homophone.com (http://www.homophone.com) – a list of American homophones with a searchable database.
Reed's Homophones (http://www.pisgahpress.com/authors/adreed/) – a book of soundalike words published in
2012
Homophones.ml (http://www.homophones.ml/) – a collection of homophones and their definitions
Homophone Machine (http://homophonemachine.allaboutlearningpress.com/) – swaps homophones in any
sentence
Between The Lions (http://pbskids.org/lions/videos/homophones.html) – a song about homophones
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