homophone means A word which is pronounced the same as another word but differs in spelling or meaning or origin. It carries an Arena rating of 1672, earned across 27 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, homophone ranks #31 of 31,407 for Qualifying, #377 of 17,060 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #2,216 of 17,064 for Most Elegant Words, #6,601 of 17,070 for Most Ingenious Words.
homophone is pronounced /ˈhɒməfəʊn/.
Why “homophone” is a great word
A word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in spelling, meaning, or origin. From French *homophone*, from Greek *homo-* ("same") + *-phone* ("sound"), first attested as an adjective in the 1620s and as a noun in 1843. Unlike a homonym, which requires identity in both spelling and sound, or a homograph, which hinges on identical spelling alone, a homophone is a pure acoustic coincidence, a fork in meaning disguised as a single sound. It is the invisible knot between *rite* and *write*, the ghostly echo linking *scent* to *sent*, the auditory trapdoor that makes *knight* and *night* indistinguishable to the ear—a small demonstration that sound and sense are not bound by contract, and that meaning, like water, finds its own level regardless of the vessel that carries it.
Etymology
From French homophone; equivalent to homo- (“same”) + -phone (“sound”).
noun
- A word which is pronounced the same as another word but differs in spelling or meaning or origin.
- A letter or group of letters which are pronounced the same as another letter or group of letters.
Words closest in meaning
By meaning, not spelling — each word's AI semantic fingerprint, nearest first.
- homonym 81% match — A word that sounds or is spelled the same as another word (but not necessarily both).; A word that both sounds and is spelled the same as another word. vs homophone →
- heterograph 73% match — A word whose sound is the same, but spelling and meaning differ from another’s. vs homophone →
- homophene 69% match — Any of a set of words that sound different, but look identical on a person's lips, so that they cannot be distinguished by lipreading. vs homophone →
- heterophone 65% match — A word with multiple pronunciations. vs homophone →
- homoform 65% match — One of two or more etymologically and semantically unrelated words with the same orthographical form (spelling), or phonetic form (pronunciation); a homonym, homograph, or homophone. vs homophone →
- homoglyph 59% match — A character identical or nearly identical in appearance to another, but which differs in the meaning it represents; thus, in character encoding terms, a character with an identical or near-identical glyph, or the glyph itself. vs homophone →
- homonymously 59% match — In a homonymous manner, so as to have the same name or relation. vs homophone →
- heteronymy 58% match — The condition of being heteronyms; the relationship between two words with different meanings and either the same spelling or the same pronunciation but not both. vs homophone →