The wonderful world of homophones
Similar sounding words with different meanings

English as a language I must say defies all explanations. Little wonder that for a non native speaker English remains an enigma of sorts and even at a later stage in life people continue to face problems with the intricacies of words. Homophones are an example of this complexity of the English language. A homphone is a word that is pronounced in very much the same way as another word but differs in meaning. It is derived from Greek, 'homo' means the same and 'phone' means sound. So, you can imagine how difficult it will be for people to know all the homophones as its not a subject that is taught extensively in schools. Who can imagine that carrot, a vegetable, has not one but two similar sounding words caret and carat? Caret means a proofreading symbol and carat means absolute, genuine, a unit used for measuring the fineness of gold and precious stones. The only way to distinguish the meaning is through the context of the usage and of course your knowledge of the word.

Some of the very commonly misspelled and confused homophones are complement/compliment, principal / principle, stationary/stationery, flour/flower, weak/week, flour/flower, suite/sweet, their/there etc. These are examples of some very basic errors made in the English language in homonym usage. At the next level we have some slightly difficult ones aisle/isle, currant/current, discreet/discrete, augur/auger, oral/aural, ascetic/acetic, fiscal/physical, pique/peak, complacent/complaisant, timbre/, moiré/moray…

Homophones are often used to create puns and to confuse the reader in crosswords or puzzles to suggest multiple meanings. Their usage is common in poetry and literature too. An example of this is seen in Dylan Thomas's radio play Under Milk Wood: "The shops in mourning" where mourning can be heard as mourning or morning. Another distinct example is Thomas Hood's use of 'birth' & 'berth' and "told' & 'toll'd' (tolled) in his poem Faithless Sally Brown:
“His death, which happen'd in his berth, At forty-odd befell:

They went and told the sexton, and The sexton toll'd the bell.”

Homophones of multiple words or phrases are known as "oronyms" This term was coined by Gyles Brandreth and first published in his book The Joy of Lex in 1980. Examples of these are "ice cream" which turns into "I scream", "four candles" becomes " fork handles", "euthanasia" into "youth in Asia". Examples of some phrases which sound alike are 'I have known oceans/no notions that you yourself couldn't imagine', 'If you listen carefully you can hear the night rain/night train', 'Reading in the library is sometimes allowed/aloud', ' That's the biggest hurdle/biggest turtle one has ever seen!'… I am sure all of us have experienced the oronyms at sometime or the other. We do get misunderstood while speaking or while hearing sometimes. Of course it is all a bit of some harmless mistake made while listening unless the slip-up lands you in a bit of a soup! An example of an oronyms poem is:
"Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh…. (Sauce unknown)"