Homophone

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the term in linguistics. For other uses, see Homophony (disambiguation).
Venn diagram showing the relationships between homophones (blue) and related linguistic concepts.

A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning. The words
may be spelled the same, such as rose (flower) and rose (past tense of "rise"), or differently, such
as carat, caret, and carrot, or to, two, and too. Homophones that are spelled the same are also
both homographs and homonyms.[1] Homophones that are spelled differently are also calledheterographs.
The term "homophone" may also apply to units longer or shorter than words, such as phrases, letters or
groups of letters that are pronounced the same as another phrase, letter or group of letters.

The word derives from the Greek homo- (ὁμο-), "same", and phōnḗ (φωνή), "voice, utterance". The
opposite is heterophones: similar, but not phonetically identical words that have the same meaning.

In wordplay and games

Homophones are often used to create puns and to deceive the reader (as in crossword puzzles) or to
suggest multiple meanings. The last usage is common in poetry and creativeliterature. An example of
this is seen in Dylan Thomas's radio play Under Milk Wood: "The shops in mourning"
where mourning can be heard as mourning or morning. Another vivid example is Thomas Hood's use
of 'birth' & 'berth' and "told' & 'toll'd' (tolled) in his poem "Faithless Sally Brown":

His death, which happen'd in his berth,

At forty-odd befell:
They went and told the sexton, and
The sexton toll'd the bell.

In some accents, various sounds have merged in that they are no longer
distinctive, and thus words that differ only by those sounds in an accent that
maintains the distinction (a minimal pair) are homophonous in the accent with
the merger. Some examples from English are:

pin and pen in many southern American accents.

merry, marry, and Mary in most American accents.
The pairs do, due and forward, foreword are homophonous in most American accents but not
in most British accents.
The pairs talk, torque, and court, caught are distinguished in rhotic accents such as Scottish
English and most dialects of American English, but are homophones in many non-rhotic
accents such as British Received Pronunciation.

Homophones of multiple words or phrases (as sometimes

seen in word games) are also known as "oronyms". This
 term was coined by Gyles Brandreth and first published in
his bookThe Joy of Lex (1980), and it was used in
the BBC programme Never Mind the Full Stops, which also
featured Brandreth as a guest.

Examples of "oronyms" (which may only be true

homophones in certain dialects of English) include:

"ice cream" vs. "I scream"

"euthanasia" vs. "youth in Asia"
"depend" vs. "deep end"
"the sky" vs. "this guy"
"four candles" vs. "fork handles"
"sand which is there" vs. "sandwiches there"
"example" vs. "egg sample"
"some others" vs. "some mothers"
"night rain" vs. "night train"
"minute" vs. "my newt"
"Long Island" vs. "lawn guy land"

Use in psychological research

[edit]Pseudo-homophones

Pseudo-homophones are non-words that are phonetically identical to a word. Pseudo-homophone

pairs are pairs of phonetically identical letter strings where one string is a word and the other is a non-
word. For example, groan/grone and crane/crain are pseudo-homophone pairs, whereas plane/plain is
a homophone pair since both letter strings are recognised words. Both types of pairs are used
in lexical decision tasks to investigate word recognition.

[edit]Use as ambiguous information

Homophones where one spelling is of a threatening nature and one is not (e.g. slay/sleigh, war/wore)
have been used in studies of anxiety as a test of cognitive models that those with high anxiety tend to
interpret ambiguous information in a threatening manner.[