Don’t jump right in with wikipedia, because it is suspect.
Back in my youth we were taught this:
homonym : same sound different spelling and meaning: be bee, knot not
synonym: different sound spelling, same meaning: couch sofa
antonym: opposite meaning: open closed
Then one day someone told me I was wrong, that what i call homonym is in fact a homophone and that homonyms are things like row (a boat) and having a row (fight).
Wikipedia agrees with that but google homonym vs synonym and you’ll find my understanding of the terms on many sites.
My biggest fear is that this subject got tangled in another proscriptivist/descriptivist battle, where enough people decided to change the definition and it’s sticking.
Well, if you go to the greek roots, homonym = “same name”. homophone = “same sound”. So it seems like Wikipedia should be correct.
BTW - both m-w.com and dictionary.com include homophone in the definition of homonym. But then another definition has the same spelling requirement. So it is not that clear cut.
This really calls for a Venn diagram, but homonyms are the intersection of homographs and homophones - words that sound the same and are spelt the same, but have unrelated meanings. Like *mine *(meaning “belonging to me”) and *mine * (“a site of mineral extraction”).
Homo- seems to be used for words that have similar written or spoken characteristics, while syn- is used for words that are similar in meaning.
I think I originally learned it the same way as you (although it was an awfully long time ago, so it is hard to be sure), but does this really have to be a problem? Why can’t homonym and homophone be synonyms? (Agreeing with JKellyMap that the row/row type of thing should clearly be a homograph.)
Another possibility, that I think I may have come across somewhere, is that homonym is a broader term, encompassing both homophones and homographs.
Homophone: main (primary) Maine (near Canada)
Homonym: mine (I own it) mine (I dig there)
Homograph: mine (I own it) mine (I dig there) OR desert (sandy, cactus) desert (abandon)
Synonym: big (large) large (big)
Antonym: small (not big) big (not small)
When I was in elementary school many decades ago, the term “homonym” was employed to indicate words that sounded the same but were spelled different and had different meanings. The term is imprecise and inaccurate, though, and so the terminology has been updated to be more accurate.
Now they are called homophones, judging by my kids’ homework.
They keep doing that with all kinds of terminology - starfish are no longer starfish, brontosauruses have gone the way of the dinosaur, Pluto is no longer a planet - is everything I learned obsolete?
A homonym is technically both a homograph (same spelling) and homophone (same sound) with different meaning. Some will also say that strict homonym has different etymologies.
“Row” and “row” is not a homonym. It is only a homograph, unless you happen to pronounce those words the same in your dialect. (I am not aware of a dialect where they are pronounced the same, but, just in case, there it is.)
Now, what you were taught in school is probably the looser definition of homonym, which is technically a homophone. My recollection is that we were taught homophones (same sound, different spelling), homographs (same spelling, different sound), and homonyms (same sound, same spelling). However, reviewing educational material online indicates that homophones are being taught as homonyms by many teachers.
