difference between homographs and homophones
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HOMEPAGE
The difference between homophones, homonyms, and homographs
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Neal Whitman, Quick and Dirty Tips
Sep 27, 2015, 8:45 PM
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Flickr / Marco Arment
Have you ever had trouble remembering the difference between homoPHONES and homoNYMS? I have. And as if that’s not confusing enough, someone will bring up homoGRAPHS.
I’m going to offer a simplified definition that will make sense to you if you’ll just agree with me on one point first: That thumbs are a kind of finger. You agree with me, right? Good!
Some etymology will help here. The root homo-, you may already realize, means “same.” It’s the same Greek root that we find in homogeneous and homosexual, but not Homo sapiens, by the way. That comes from a Latin root meaning “human.”
Homophones
First let’s tackle homophones. The root –phone means “sound,” as it does in telephone and phonics. So homophones are words that sound the same, such as doe a deer, a female deer, and dough that you bake into bread.
Homographs
Next, let’s do homographs. The root -graph means “write,” just as it does in autograph and telegraph. So homographs are words that are written the same—that is, words that have the same spelling. For example, there’s the verb tears, as in “Squiggly tears the speeding ticket in two,” and the noun tears, meaning the salty drops of water that ran down your cheek when you watched the movie Inside Out. They’re homographs because they’re both spelled T-E-A-R-S.