AMERICAN ENGLISH HOMOPHONES

Compiled by Evan Antworth

This is a list of homophones in "General American English". It is based on the book _Handbook of Homophones_ by William Cameron Townsend, 1975. For the purpose at hand, the list contains words that sound the same (or very nearly the same) but are spelled differently. Thus the list includes "bear" and "bare" but not "bear" (noun) and "bear" (verb). However, the list does occasionally include spelling variants of the same word when there is another word in the same entry; for instance, "ax,axe,acts" is in the list but not "blessed,blest".(Note that the only difference between "homophones" and "spelling variant" is whether or not the words are lexically "the same".)

Obviously, the determination of what counts as sounding the "same" depends on the dialect of the speaker. Some of the entries in this list may be homophones in my speech but not yours (for instance, "awed" and "odd". The designation "General American English" should be sufficient to disallow strong regional dialects (in the south, "tire" and "tar" can be homophones!) while allowing for some minor variation. For instance, there are entries for "cot,caught" and "marry,merry,Mary".

The list contains a few proper names, which are capitalized; e.g. "Pete" and "peat". I think this is useful as long as proper names are limited to common ones. (Proper names that differ only in case from common nouns are not included, e.g. "bill,"Bill".) If any and all proper names were fair game, I fear we would be off and running (how about "Malays" and "malaise"?). But I am open to advice.

The format of the list is as follows. Each set of homophones is on a single line terminated by a return. The members of a set are separated by commas with no trailing spaces. (Thus it is essentially the same as "comma-delimited" database format.) The list is alphabetized by the first word (the headword) in each set (line). Each word in the list occurs as a headword; thus each word occurs at least twice: once as a headword and at least once in the tail of the list. This scheme permits retrieval from the list by examining the headword of each line only. For instance:

ascent,assent
assent,ascent

In general, regularly inflected forms of an entry are not included; thus the list contains "bough,bow" but not "boughs,bows". Do you think it is worth adding such entries?

Fair use policy

Please use this list as the common property of the general academic community. You may redistribute the list in its original form (or at least its "official" form), but you should not sell it or use it in a commercial product without permission. If you use it in a research project or publication, please give due credit. You may freely modify it for your own use, but if you distribute a modified version, you should make clear what changes you have made to the original list. Above all, if you make enhancements to the list, please send such enhancements to us so that we can pass them along to the rest of the users of the list. All correspondence regarding this list should be sent to:
-----------------------------
SIL International Linguistics Department
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Road Dallas, TX  75236 U.S.A.

Number of headwords / entries: 1,538 / 1,538.