I also do the AW-ral vs. ORE-al thing.
Tidbit: when I was a kid we had a neighbor named Al. I thought his name was Owl. My parents were poor enunciators.
Choral?
The difference between oral and aural and Aaron and Erin are obvious with many non-American accents. The words sound completely different to me.
Aural was coined in the late 1970’s, whereas oral has been around since the turn of the twentieth century.
Oh, wait.
Can I get a DUH here? They’re both directly from Latin. I generally pronounce them the same, but if I was going to be clear, I’d use OW-ral for aural and OH-ral for oral, which is probably close to the original Latin pronunciation of the roots.
Duh.
A girl once told me that she liked oral sex. I wasn’t sure if she said oral or aural so I just stuck my tongue in her ear.
Does oral/aural sex mean you just talk about it?
Sorta kinda what I meant, but not really.
To me an accent is what you sound like when you speak. I went with ‘regional quirk’ because that kind of covers not only the way you normally speak, but how you understand the way the words can be spoken.
I’m assuming that if someone’s querying aural vs oral, then it’s because looking at the two words they can’t see a different way of pronouncing those two to make the inference clearer.
Now, I’m a South Australian, therefore I speak with a South Australian accent.
SA has a strong English history and most South Australians are aware of the ‘correct’ (or at least alternative) pronounciation of common words and can switch over to those when required. I expect the same holds true in most of England, and some other Australian states.
Hence ‘regional quirk’ rather than ‘accent’. 
I have a favoured way of speaking, but I can see alternatives if necessary for the sake of clarity. Couldn’t carry on a full conversation with a British accent, but there’s enough crossover to be useful.
Is there a pronunciation difference between “Don” and “Dawn”? I sort of suspect there is, but I’m unable to speak them differently.
Homonyms? Homonyms?! Homonyms are words that are spelled the same but have different meanings. Homophones, which is probably what you were thinking of, are words that are spelled differently but are pronounced the same.
Another Midwesterner for ‘oral’ & ‘aural’ and ‘Erin’ & ‘Aaron’ sounding the same.
So if Bruce_Daddy says “ass” and “ice” are homonyms then context wouldn’t matter… you’d better ask for it neat.
I’m from the west coast and I pronounce aural/oral the same (rhyming with coral and choral, but not corral), as well as Aaron/Erin, Don/Dawn, and mary/marry/merry… and also fairy/ferry and Harry/hairy, while we’re at it.
Where are you from? I mean, to me, this is like asking whether there’s a pronunciation difference between dog and cat.
And then there’s “cot” and “caught”…
I would thought “court” and “caught” would be more common.
No way. Court has an r in it, caught doesn’t. BIG difference.
And it’s also for the best that churches with choirs, who make music pleasing to the ear, don’t advertise their aural sects.
Not in the UK, there isn’t.
“Cot” and “caught”: Exactly the same out here. (Similarly: “haughty” and “hottie”.)
“Court” and “caught”: Very different, no possibility of mistaking them. (Similarly: “cores” and “cause”.)
What about “coarse” and “course”… does anyone pronounce those distinctly?
“Auris” is nominative singular for ear in Latin, and “ora” nominative singular for mouth.
They pronouced them differently, as far as we can tell. Don’t blame the Romans - blame yourselves!
As a Northern Midwesterner, I can tell you that merry-marry-Mary are homophones in my dialect - as are Aaron-Erin and aural-oral. My father, from the east coast, makes distinctions between all of them when he speaks (although I can’t really even hear the difference between the different Marys).
This kind of regional dialect difference is normal. On the west coast, the vowels in “cot” and “Don” and those in “caught” and “dawn” have merged into one vowel; perhaps this will spread too.
What’s necessary to understand is not just that people in different places speak differently (and I’ll spare the rant on assuming one particular dialect is “correct” while the others are “wrong”) but we hear differently as well. What is perceived as one particular sound, for instace /n/, is usually actually several different sounds - [n], [N], and a lot that I can’t write without special fonts. However, to the untrained ear, the “n” in “saint” and the “n” in “sank” probably sound the same, even though they are made in a completely different part of the mouth.
Your perceptions are partially defined by an internal representation of the language, and if you are a native speaker of an English dialect that pronounces “cot” and “caught” the same, you probably can’t even hear the difference between the two words when I say them, even if they sound quite different to me.
What’s the point of this? Just that you should expect some word pairs to sound the same in one dialect and different in another, and that’s cool, and no one’s right or wrong here.
Obviously here is someone who hasn’t heard that Scotland is part of the “UK.” Anglocentric Sassenach.
I was taught that rite/right/write, maid/made, etc. are examples of homonyms in school, and was never taught the term homophone. Checking a couple of online dictionaries, we’re both right. The Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary http://dictionary.cambridge.org says
Definition
homonym [Show phonetics]
noun [C]
a word that sounds the same or is spelled the same as another word but has a different meaning:
‘No’ and ‘know’ are homonyms.
‘Bow’ (= bend at the waist) and ‘bow’ (= weapon) are also homonyms.
One of two or more words that have the same sound and often the same spelling but differ in meaning, such as bank (embankment) and bank (place where money is kept).
(notice it says “often the same spelling”).
I was never taught any term for multiple meanings for the same spelling; it’s just a word that has more than one meaning!