Or strictly speaking, words with the most heterographs, i.e. groups of words that are pronounced the same but have different spellings and meanings. There is this set of four:
new
knew
gnu
nu (Greek letter)
all of which (in some common dialects of English) are pronounced “noo” (in other dialects some or all of them are pronounced “nyoo”).
Any other examples?
Bo
Bow
Bough
Beau
Isaac Asimov once had a mystery hinge on that:
two, to, too, and “Et tu, Brute?”
Also: write, right, wright, and rite.
Not quite as many, but wildly differing definitions:
hoard
horde
whored
Technically, of course, the most homophones belong to
Verizon’s San Francisco Office
And, in British English at least, “hawed” (hesitated vocally) as in “hemmed and hawed”.
Thinking of that British non-rhotic thing, there’s also
board
bored
bawd
baud (bit of a stretch maybe, but dictionary.com lists it, pronounced “bawd”)
He said word, not world.
The most I know of is “air”, though some of them are a bit of a stretch:
Air: Breathable gas
Err: Make a mistake
Heir: Scion
Aire: A tune (as in, “Londonderry Aire”)
Are: A unit of area equal to 100 square meters (it’s what a hectare is 100 of).
There’s also bite, bight, and byte, and it seems to me I used to know another one for that set, but I can’t remember it.
EDIT: Another foursome.
You: Second person
Ewe: Female sheep
Yew: Bow-wood tree
U: 21st letter
Another foursome:
Thew
Phew
Few
Feu (as in fee)
Ere: before
E’er: ever
Thanks, hibernicus, I should have remembered those.
And Quartz, in what dialect are “thew” and “phew” homophones?
Nice, although I don’t recognise “aire”. I thought the tune was called “Londonderry Air”. Still, with “ere” that’s a set of five. I don’t pronounce “err” like “air” myself, but I think I have heard others do so.
And of course, French has a set of 6 homophones (though only five different spellings) that are, AFAIK etymologically distinct: vert (green), ver (worm), vers (verse), vers (towards), verre (glass), and vaire (a kind of fur, weasel I think). And Cinderella’s “glass slipper” (makes no sense) was based on confusion between the last two words.
I believe “err” is pronounced more like “ur”, is it not?
Hey!:
Not
Naught
Knot
Dew
Due
Do
Carrot
Carat
Karat
Caret
A fun example I remember from Games Magazine some time back:
When the shepherd asked us “Did YOUSE see any EWES over by the YEWS?” we knew he didn’t USE good grammar.
youse
ewes
yews
use
u’s
By
Bye
Bi
Buy
I
Aye
Eye
Eau
O
Oh
Owe
The funniest book that nobody’s ever heard of is The World’s Largest Cheese by Christopher Cerf.
Cerf was part of the Harvard Lampoon in its glory days, and while there published a cartoon piece with Michael K. Frith and Jack Winter called “See the Merino Standing There, with His Long, Shaggy Hair.” A merino is a type of long-haired sheep. Each page is a cartoon of a merino plus a caption of wordplay. You see the merino with a long shaggy:
hair
hare
Eyre
Eire
air
hayer
heir
before veering off into “C,” the merino or the merino “Stan Ding.” The cartoons are great and you can’t get the humor without them. So you have to buy the book. You will thank me.
Are we allowed to cross over language boundaries?
Driving on the highway, getting hungry, we see signs for a place with great frittatas…
Aye, I eye āy, ai ail Ei, ai ay.
āy - Arabic for ‘signs’
ai - Chinese for ‘love’
ail - French for ‘garlic’
Ei - German for ‘egg’
ai - Italian for ‘to the’
ay - Turkish for ‘moon’.