Exploring Homonyms
What are they are Why are they so Confusing?
According to a blog post on the Merriam-Webster website, the English language contains 1 million words. Many linguists believe that estimate is too low, the author of the blog post claimed. Anyway, I don’t want to argue, quibble, or debate about the overall word count of the language I have spoken all my life. Instead, let’s look at key relationships among English words. Specifically in this post, I want to explore homonyms. Why? Because understanding how words can sound the same but have different meanings and sometimes different spellings will improve our writing and English proficiency.
Homonym means same name in the Greek language. This linguistic term covers two categories.
Examples of Homographs
As children build their vocabulary, they learn that words can have multiple meanings.
Chair: a piece of furniture
Chair: a person in a leadership role, usually a chairman or chairwoman
Park: to drive a car in a specific place on the street or in a lot
Park: a place to play
Minute: sixty seconds
Minute: a small amount of something
Sense: to perceive through the five senses
Sense: to be logical or understood, to make sense
Examples of Homophones
The most difficult of these word groups for both children and adults are the homophones, especially a challengs when writing. These words sound the same but have different spellings and meanings such as the following pairs:
Hear: to receive sound through the ear
here: to be present right now
there: to be somewhere other than here
they’re: a contraction of “they are”
their: refers to something that belongs to them
sense: one of the five senses
cents: a word for more than one penny
tents: used for camping
tense: a feeling of being uptight, stressed
main: essential, as in the main idea; the chief point or part
mane: the long hair of a horse running from the head to the back
If you want to test your knowledge of homonyms, check out this quiz I created last year. Click on the picture below to open the English quiz.