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This page published by John Higgins, formerly of Bristol and Stirling Universities and now retired in Shaftesbury. It was last updated 20 November 2009. Please note that in order to see the phonetic characters correctly you must have the Lucida Sans Unicode font installed. Most modern Windows and Macintosh computers are likely to have this.

HOMOGRAPHS

A list of English words which have two pronunciations but one spelling

Contents

• Definitions
• Double-stress words
• Stress homographs
• Words ending in -ate
• Words ending in -ment
• Voicing distinctions
• -ed adjectives
• "True" homographs
• A tonemic homograph
• Homographs from abbreviations
• Homographic place names
• Alphabetical list of all homographs
• Phonetic transcription key

Definitions

Not everybody uses this set of definitions, though they would be accepted by the majority of trained linguistics scholars. In wider usage (reflected in some dictionaries) the term homograph includes what I have here called homonyms and polysemes, i.e. words of unrelated meaning or etymology but the same spelling and pronunciation, such as right and fly. For those people the term for what I am calling homographs is heteronyms, a term not much used by professional linguists. (Heterophone would be a much more appropriate description since what is different is the sound, not the name.)

Homographs are a minor problem for anyone learning English as a foreign language, but a much greater problem for anyone trying to design a foolproof text-to-speech algorithm for a computer. If one pronunciation is far commoner than the other (as with the word second, for instance) the programmer will probably ignore the exceptional case. Where both pronunciations occur frequently, as with object or read, the programmer must try to find contextual markers on which to base a rule.

The ultimate source of this list is the Roger Mitton machine-readable version of the 1974 Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary. The dictionary contained 537 words which had more than one pronunciation listed. Some of these were simply words with varying pronunciations and no shift of meaning, such as breeches, dowsing, and piano or varying stress patterns such as bow-wow, bye-bye, and fricassee, and these were discarded. There were also four strong-form/weak-form pairs, a, an, to and 'cos (it is not clear why these were the only such pairs to emerge), three cases of abbreviations matching ordinary words, am (before noon), in (inch), and no (number), and one case of a loan word overlapping with an established English word, real (presumably referring to the old Spanish coin rather than the football team).

The remaining 488 words plus about sixty more which were not in the dictionary have been classified into relevant groupings and are listed below. The spellings and phonetic transcriptions are mainly as they appear in the dictionary, though I have used Gimsonian IPA symbols rather than the Alvey transcription that Mitton had to use so that he could store his dictionary as a text file. There is also a complete alphabetical checklist of homographs which you can consult if looking for a particular word.

Double stress

A number of double-stress words showed up. These are words whose pronunciation varies with their position in the phrase, front-stressed before a noun and end-stressed when final in the phrase, though without substantial change of meaning. (Compare "an overnight bag" with "Are you staying overnight?")

There are a number of other English words which behave in the same way, such as afternoon, bamboo, downhill, downstairs, inside, overseas, princess, routine, sardine, underground, upstairs, together with many compound adjectives (easy-going, home-made), all nationality adjectives ending in -ese, numbers from 13 to 99 (apart from multiples of 10), and many place names such as Bombay, Hong Kong, New York, and Torquay. In these other cases the dictionary did not record both stress patterns. Probably only the word overall (with its secondary meaning of an item of clothing) should be counted as a homograph, since in the other cases the change of pronunciation signals only a syntactic feature rather than a shift of meaning.

Stress homographs

The next distinct group, which was by far the largest, was the set of nouns (or adjectives) with front-stress against verbs (or adjectives) with end-stress with 288 words altogether. One suspects that in a good many cases the distinction is unnecessary for intelligibility; the set of -port words (export, import, transport) for instance are often heard with front stress even when being used as verbs, and I have heard on air the word increase stressed both ways as noun and both ways as verb. In thirty cases (listed in the table below) there is a large difference in meaning and use between the two spoken forms while in other cases the difference is more syntactic than lexical.

There are four cases needing further comment.

• The word entrance, while looking like a stress homograph, should perhaps be counted as a true homograph, since the noun sense derives from the verb enter while the verb sense derives from the noun trance.
• The word deserts exists as two different nouns, one front-stressed meaning 'dry places', and the other end-stressed meaning 'what one deserves' and occurring usually in the fixed phrase 'get one's just deserts'. This second use has a homophone in the word desserts meaning 'sweet courses', which gives rise to many spelling errors and headline puns.
• The word process exists as a noun with front-stress and as two different verbs, one with front-stress with a meaning linked to the noun process and one with end-stress with a meaning linked to the noun procession.
• Similarly the word second exists as two separate verbs, one with front stress meaning to support a proposal at a formal meeting, and one with end stress meaning to send somebody away on temporary duty. The second use is fairly unusual, being mainly confined to military and civil service contexts.

The meanings of the thirty special cases are as follows:

This is the full list of 288 words:

There were two interesting words which reversed the trend of this set, words where the front-stressed form was the (3rd person singular) verb and a form with stress later in the word was the (plural) noun:

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-ATE words

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-MENT words

A similar but smaller group was the set of words ending with -ment where the noun sense uses a schwa while the verb sense uses a full vowel. There were five of these (ten including the inflectional variants).

Two more small groups could also be identified and separated. The first was the nine -ed adjectives with matching verb past tenses:

Not in the dictionary with both pronunciations but behaving similarly is the word beloved, which has three syllables as a noun or attributive adjective, but only two as a passive participle. ("I loved and was beloved again": Byron.) This dictionary listed wicked only as a two-syllable adjective, but the full OED also lists a one-syllable pronunciation, meaning "having a wick".

The other group was the set of French loan words whose Anglicised plural is not represented in the spelling. Only three were recorded in the lists, but one expects there must be more.

"True" homographs

That left the following set of 46 homographs (86 if all the inflectional variants are counted) arising from a variety of causes. This section of the list includes those words like moped and wound which are most typical of what we have in mind when we think of homographs.

Several other homographs failed to show up in the dictionary list; job/Job, august/August, polish/Polish and reading/Reading are distinguished by capitalisation and would only be homographs in sentence-initial position or in all-upper-case writing. The word dove is a homograph for speakers of Amercian English but not for the British for whom the past tense of dive is dived. In four cases of recent loan words, pate, rose, resume and attaches,the homograph is disambiguated by retaining the French accents in the English spelling. Several problems occur with the prefix re-, for instance in the words recall and resent,where usage is inconsistent and is probably changing. In general the prefix re- often has the potential to enter homographs as one returns to earlier meanings of the base form. Thus we talk of reform /rɪ'fɔm/ in the church or the legal system, but a sculptor might reform /,ri'fɔm/ a clay model; you can make a remark /rɪ'mɑk/ in speech, while a teacher may remark /,ri'mɑk/ a contested exam paper. The contrast between the two-syllable and three-syllable pronunciations of evening may not be consistently made by all RP speakers, though all would recognise it, I believe. In several other cases the words below were presumably missed out of the dictionary because the listing of inflected and derived forms was selective. Many of these words are particularly popular with crossword setters since they allow for the creation of misleading cryptic clues. (See below for examples.)

Quite: a tonemic homograph

Abbreviations

Place names

Number of elks, perhaps, surrounding a wild animal's lair. (8)
Answer: DEADENER (something which numbs, DEER—elks perhaps— round A DEN—wild animal's lair).
(The Times, 26 April 2006).

Stagger, describing Birmingham area. (8)
Answer: ASTONISH (Aston-ish, Aston being a part of Birmingham.)
(The Times, 8 June 2006).

One very reliable tugboat (5, 2, 8)
Answer: TOWER OF STRENGTH
(The Times, 19 June 2006).

Difference in sequence (3)
Answer: ROW
(The Times, 21 June 2006).

Energy to get closer (3)
Answer: ZIP (something which closes, as well as energy)
(The Times, 2 July 2005).

Nice fellow councillor blocking attempt to obtain novel (10, 5)
Answer:FRENCHMAN'S CREEK (title of a novel by Daphne du Maurier, a Nice fellowis a FRENCHMAN, CR abbreviation for Councillor in the word SEEK,attempt).
(The Times, 27 July 2006).

Polish brigade involve one in runners on board. (10)
Answer: CHAIRWOMEN (Women who run boards, CHARWOMEN are the brigade of polishers, surrounding 1).
(The Times, 25 January 2007).

Less sensitive issue of magazine. (10)
Answer: NUMBER
(The Times, 22 October 2008).

Object to having ice-cream not guacamole for starters. (5)
Answer: THING (Object, first letters of the next five words.)
(The Times, 31 July 2009)

References and acknowledgements:

Higgins, J (1984). "It or ate; a note on the pronunciation of words ending in -ate.", ELT Journal 38, 1, p. 50-51.

My thanks to Eduardo Parra for suggesting agape, Peter Reitan for bustier, and to Daniel Asimov and Charles Jeffery for the extremely specialised homographs of periodic and unionized.

I am also grateful to Konrad Szczesniak and James Newton for drawing attention to the re- words recall and resent.

Vowels	Keyword	Transcribed		Consonants	Keyword	Transcribed
i	key	ki		p	pea	pi
ɪ	pit	pɪt		b	bee	bi
e	pet	pet		t	toe	təʊ
æ	pat	pæt		d	doe	dəʊ
ɑ	hard	hɑd		k	cap	kæp
ɒ	pot	pɒt		g	get	get
ɔ	raw	rɔ		f	fat	fæt
ʊ	put	pʊt		v	vet	vet
u	coo	ku		Ɵ	thin	Ɵɪn
ʌ	hut	hʌt		ð	then	ðen
3	cur	k3		s	sack	sæk
ə	about/mother	əbaʊt/mʌðə		z	zoo	zu
eɪ	bay	beɪ		ʃ	ship	ʃɪp
aɪ	buy	baɪ		ʒ	measure	meʒə
ɔɪ	boy	bɔɪ		h	hide	haɪd
əʊ	go	gəʊ		m	man	mæn
aʊ	cow	kaʊ		n	no	nəʊ
ɪə	peer	pɪə		ŋ	sing	sɪŋ
eə	pair	peə		l	lie	laɪ
ʊə	poor	pʊə		r	red	red
				j	year	jɪə
				w	wet	wet
				ʧ	chin	ʧɪn
				ʤ	judge	ʤʌʤ

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