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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 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: