One I was thinking about today is oar (boat acessory) ore (raw material) or (conjunction) and Orr (surname.) Are there single-syllable sounds with 5 or 6 or more real-world spellings? (Probably better stick to alphabetish writing systems, as ideogram based ones are probably pretty full of them.)
I knew a fellow named Orr who told me about getting into a dispute with a store manager. The regional manager instructed the local guy to write an apology, which dutifully arrived addressed to Mr. Whore.
How close does the pronunciation have to be? Bean, been, and bin - the announcers in New Zealand call Ben Smith “Been Smeth”. Vowel shifts and all that.
Aye, I, eye
“Heterograph” is the term for words that are pronounced the same but spelt differently. I can think of another four-way heterograph - right, rite, wright, write…
My best offer is a five-way:
Air
Heir
Are [the unit of measurement for an area]
E’er [abbreviation of “ever”]
Ere
The OED tells me that the same pronunciation is acceptable in US English for “err”. I wouldn’t pronounce it that way but, if you would, that giveS you a six-way.
Expect plenty of arguments over this, since whether words are heterographs or not is to a significant extent dialect-, variant- and accent dependent. For example, “why” and “wye” are heterographs in some variants of English, but not in others.
Jim
Gym
Gem
Jem(?)
Are foreign languages eligible?
เขา เข่า เข้า เฃ้า เค่า เค้า เข๋า ขาว ข้าว ข่าว ฃ่าว เก่า เกา เก้า ก้าว กาว
I’ve padded the list with some archaic spellings, but I’ve probably missed some homonyms (or near-homonyms) altogether. The first eleven words above all have khao as the official transcription; the final five have kao. (The Paiboon transliterations are kǎo kào kâo kâo kâo káo kâao kǎao kâao kàao kàao gào gao gâao gâao gaao, or such.
Some of the words in the list above have same-spelled homonyms, BTW. เขา can mean hill, antler, pigeon, vine, 3rd-person pronoun, or a childish 1st-person pronoun.)
Every Sunday in an Episcopalian church we agreed that “We have ‘aired’, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.”
You missed awe and aw.
There is a dialect where those are pronounced the same way as oar/ore/or/Orr?
Map of the “pen-pin merger” — the southern US:
You might also be able to add “aire” to the air cluster, depending on the rules. It’s somewhat archaic, and I don’t think there’s any place you could use “aire” that you couldn’t use “air”, but it is a different spelling.
Many people say ‘oar’ and ‘ore’ the same way, but differently from ‘or’ and ‘Orr’. And to them, none of them sound like ‘awe’.
Thanks for this.
Had a moment of trying to work out how “Jim” and “Gem” fit on the same list.
Right/Wright/Rite/Write?
Many (most?) English people would pronounce all those words identically, including “awe”. I certainly would, as I have a non-rhotic accent. One possible exception: I am not familiar with the name “Orr”, but I suppose I might pronounce the “r” in that one.
Even a following vowel wouldn’t break the homophone, because non-rhotic speakers would tend to put an “intrusive r” in all those cases, such that “awe and shock” would sound the same as “oar and shock”.
& how many of them can you use in one sentence?
If I’m using a sharp instrument to cut two pieces of fruit I’m paring a pair of pears.
In French there is a set of 6 homophones (but only five spellings): verre, ver, vers (verse), vers (towards), vair, vert. The confusion between vair (a kind of fur) and verre (glass) is apparently the cause of Cinderella’s glass slipper in the English version. Better than a slipper of worms (ver) I guess.
Toad
towed
toed
Counting creatively, I get 17 that sound like Wales. Of course not all speakers pronounce initial w and wh alike, and the common English pronunciation of Weyl is very unlike the original German pronunciation:
- whales (cetaceans, not capitalized),
- whale’s (belonging to a whale),
- whales’ (belonging to more than one whale),
- wails (cries),
- wail’s (pertaining to a wail),
- wails’ (pertaining to more than one wail),
- Wales (the country in Britain, capitalized),
- wales (ridges, not capitalized),
- Wales’ (belonging to the country of Wales),
- wale’s (pertaining to a ridge),
- wales’ (pertaining to more than one ridge),
- Weyls (more than one person surnamed Weyl),
- Weyl’s (belonging to a person surnamed Weyl),
- Weyls’ (belonging to more than one person surnamed Weyl)
- Whales (capitalized, more than one person surnamed Whale)
- Whale’s (belonging to a person surnamed Whale)
- Whales’ (belonging to more than one person surnamed Whale)
I pronounce ‘towed’ with a vowel that’s quite a bit longer than in ‘toad’. I think ‘toed’, as in ‘he toed the ball over the line’ is somewhere in between. Similarly there are words that I pronounce the same that others wouldn’t, eg ‘pool’ and ‘pull’.
The point being that English spelling isn’t always as illogical or inexplicable as some might believe, some dialects retain distinctions that have been lost in others.
Mays – this is one of the coldest Mays in history
May’s – belonging to May
Maze
Maize
How else would you pronounce it? They definitely do in my mind (My inner and outer voice is RP English). I’m pretty sure I’ve heard pretty much every American accent saying things like “awesome” and “aw shucks” and they sound the same.