Last Updated on January 23, 2023
Larry of “Larry’s Blog” left me with a grammatical challenge. He asked what words like “bow,” which have two different pronunciations as well as meanings with the same spelling, are called.
A homophone is a set of words that are pronounced the same but have different meanings. “To,” “too,” and “two” are all pronounced the same way, but each spelling carries a separate meaning.
After a little research, the best explanation I’ve found is that words like “minute,” which have different pronunciations (like “MY-NUTE” or “MIN-IT”) depending on how they’re used at the time, are called homographs.
Both homophones and homographs belong to a bigger category of words known as homonyms.
Ain’t grammar fun?
