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What is a homophone? And how many types of homophones are there? These questions and more will be answered below – and there’s even some language archaeology!
Author
Jessica Milner
Published
December 20, 2023
What is a homophone? And how many types of homophones are there? These questions will be answered below – and there’s even some language archaeology!
Author
Jessica Milner
Published
Dec 20, 2023
What is a homophone? And how many types of homophones are there? These questions and more will be answered below – and there’s even some language archaeology!
Author
Jessica Milner
Published
Dec 20, 2023
Key takeaways
Table of contents
Homophones are words that sound the same, are similar or are spelt the same. However, all types of homophones have different meanings to each other.
Once you’ve heard them a few times, they become much easier to spot in text and can be fun to find and talk about with your friends!
Homophones are super fun to learn, but they can be tricky to find in the first place because they’re disguised as other words!
Homophones are words that are either:
For example: Flower / Flour
‘I picked the flower from my beautiful garden.’
‘I baked a giant cake with a big bag of flour.’
Try reading these sentences out loud. Do you see how they sound the same?
Even though they sound the same, ‘flower’ and ‘flour’ have two very different meanings!
For example: Read / Read
‘I like to read in the afternoon because it makes me happy!’
‘My teacher asked me if I’d read the book before.’
‘Can you read these sentences out loud?’ Can you read them to yourself in your head? Did you hear how ‘read’ sounded different to ‘read’?
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In summary, a homophone is when two words or more are spelled or sound the same, but have different meanings.
Here are some homophone examples:
‘I wind the clock’
‘I can feel the wind’
‘I insure my car’
‘I ensure I bring my lunch to school’
‘Here, Miss!’
‘I hear you!’
‘The rose smells sweet’
‘I rise early in the morning’
‘There are seven rows of cats looking at me’
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Here’s a list of common homophones. Some of them are spelt differently but sound the same, whereas others are spelt the same but sound different!
If you try reading them out loud, it makes it easy to hear the difference.
Homophones can feel a little confusing to get to grips with, so it’s much more enjoyable to make it into a game!
A fun way to learn about the types of homophones is to understand where the words originate from. Almost all the types of homophones originate from Ancient Greece, so we can look at their origins to find out what they mean like language archeologists!
The origin of homophone is ‘homo’ meaning ‘same’, and ‘phone’ meaning ‘voice’! One voice!
Let’s look at the types of homophones below to learn all about them – we’ll show you the archaeologist part, too!
Homographs are when two or more words are spelled the same, but not always pronounced the same. Words that are homographs have different meanings and word origins.
The origin of homograph is ‘homo’ meaning ‘same’, and ‘graph’ meaning ‘written’ – written the same!
Heterographs are when two or more words have different spellings but aren’t always pronounced the same. Heterographs also have different meanings and word origins.
The origin of heterograph is ‘hetero’ meaning ‘different’, and ‘graph’ meaning ‘written’ – written differently!
Heteronyms are when two or more words are spelled the same, and are always pronounced differently. Heteronyms also have different meanings and word origins.
The origin of heteronym is ‘hetero’ meaning ‘different’, and ‘onym’ meaning ‘name’ – different name.
Oronyms are when two or more words are spelled differently, and are pronounced similarly. Oronymns also have different meanings and word origins.
The origin of oronym is ‘oro’ meaning ‘mountain’, and ‘nym’ meaning ‘word’… mountain?
Well actually this word was made up more recently, and someone used the Latin language’s version of ‘oro’ meaning ‘mouth’ – there that makes more sense! – mouth-word!
Pseudo-homophones are quite new too. These are when two or more words are mistaken for homophones, when really one is a real word and the other/s aren’t.
The origin of pseudo-homophone is ‘pseudo’ meaning ‘false’, and ‘homophone’ meaning ‘one-voice’ – false one-voice!
Synophones are when two or more words are spelt differently but nearly sound the same. Synophones have different meanings and word origins.
The origin of synophone may also have some Latin origins for ‘syn’ meaning ‘together’, and ‘phone’ meaning ‘voice’.
That is a lot of homophony!
Kids start learning about homophones in Year 2, before KS2 even begins. They then keep learning more and more types of homophones until they reach Years 5 and 6, where they learn to distinguish between homophones and other words which are often confused.
Did you write a lot today, or maybe you read more? I hope you enjoyed reading, and that you got lots of these homophone words right!
Remember, if you need to come back and look at this again, go for it! We wrote it, but it doesn’t mean we remember everything here. Learning is about going over something so many times, you can’t possibly not keep it in your head!
Lesson credits
Jessica Milner
This decade is a super exciting one for EdTech, and I'm lucky enough to be right in the middle of it. I've used green screens as an English teacher in Vietnam, written children’s books that wow and motivate, been the head scriptwriter for a popular children's EdTech app and been an all-dancing-all-singing online teacher! I believe in making education inviting and accessible to all. My ethos is: we're all different and we all learn differently, so why not lay out a smorgasbord of educational treats and dig in!
Jessica Milner
This decade is a super exciting one for EdTech, and I'm lucky enough to be right in the middle of it. I've used green screens as an English teacher in Vietnam, written children’s books that wow and motivate, been the head scriptwriter for a popular children's EdTech app and been an all-dancing-all-singing online teacher! I believe in making education inviting and accessible to all. My ethos is: we're all different and we all learn differently, so why not lay out a smorgasbord of educational treats and dig in!
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