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I got to thinking about the word “hormone” the other day. As an adolescent, I always smiled at that word because its homophone is designed to make a teenager giggle — whore moan. The reaction it elicited in science class was a perpetual pain in the arse to biology teachers, and pain itself is a homophone, because it can also refer to a sheet of glass, which oh so appropriately can cause significant pain — to the arse or elsewhere — if it shatters.
Homophones abound in the English language, to the despair of non-native speakers of English. How to understand, or even explain, two (or more) words that are pronounced exactly the same way but are spelled differently and have different meanings and origins? Life would be easier if we only knew how to distinguish between them, but new homophones seem to appear in the dictionary every year so it’s hard to keep pace.
It’s also hard to keep things straight between homophones and homographs. Both of these are homonyms, and I used to get them all mixed up but it’s actually easy to distinguish among them. Homonyms are the overall category: any two or more words that more or less sound the same to the ear but are different. Homographs share the same spelling and usually (not always) the same pronunciation but they have different meanings. English is rife with them, driving language students from other countries totally…
