Même son, mot différent

Five words, one sound. Nothing distinguishes them in speech at all; only the sentence does.

Three different final consonants and one prefix, all silent, all landing on /sɑ̃/.

The one that costs marks in French schools. Six spellings, one sound, and every one is a different piece of grammar — which is why French children spend years on dictées.

Five spellings for one vowel — and eau uses three letters to write a sound with none of them in it.

The most-corrected error in written English, and it exists only because the spellings were fixed before the sounds merged.

Four origins — Germanic, Germanic, Latin, Germanic — and the silent letters at the front are the fossils of sounds English used to say.

Two dead consonants in one word. Nearly every English homophone with a silent letter is a fossil of something people used to pronounce.

A homophone made on purpose. English does this occasionally — it also split flour/flower and check/cheque the same way.

Three routes out of Latin into English, arriving centuries apart, landing on one sound.

Same sound, same tone, six different characters — and there are more. Chinese solves in writing what it cannot solve in sound, which is the entire argument for the character set.

This is why Chinese words are mostly TWO syllables. One syllable is too ambiguous to be useful, so the language pairs them up: 希望 xīwàng 'hope', 呼吸 hūxī 'breathe'.

And 一 yī 'one' is the same syllable in a different tone. Chinese has roughly 1,300 tone-syllables to spend on its entire vocabulary.

These are NOT homophones, and that is the point of including them. The tone is a consonant-and-vowel-level distinction in Chinese, as real as b against p — and it is the only thing keeping these four apart.

Cantonese has these too — six tones do not solve everything. But it has markedly fewer of them than Mandarin, and the next set shows why.

The cleanest demonstration on this page. Two characters that are homophones in Mandarin are not homophones in Cantonese, because Cantonese kept the final -p and -k that Mandarin lost around a thousand years ago. Same script, same words, different amount of collision.

Not true homophones: PITCH separates them, which Japanese does not write. Tokyo speakers hear three different words where the kana show one.

Around twenty common words share this sound, and pitch does not separate these — only the kanji do. It is why Japanese speakers draw characters in the air mid-conversation.

Pitch separates 神 from the other two and does nothing for 紙 against 髪. Japanese does not write pitch, so the kanji are carrying the load.

Four everyday words, one sound, no pitch difference. Japanese speakers disambiguate by drawing the character on a palm — a gesture that exists because of exactly this.

One rule makes this pair: a voiced consonant at the end of a word is said unvoiced. The spelling keeps the г because the genitive лу́га brings it back.

The same rule again. Russian spelling is honest about the root and silent about the sound.

One spelling now, two before 1918: peace was мир and world was міръ, with a different i. The spelling reform merged them — so War and Peace could equally be read War and the World, and Russians have argued about Tolstoy's title ever since.

German has three ways to write a long vowel — double it, add an h, or leave it — and they sound identical.

ei and ai are the same sound. ai survives in a handful of words and exists only to keep pairs like this apart on paper.

A silent h that distinguishes nothing audible. German keeps it because the words are unrelated and the eye needs the help.

b and v are the same sound in Spanish — there is no /v/ at all. Nearly every Spanish homophone comes from that, or from the silent h.

Two Spanish facts at once: b and v are one sound, and ll and y merged for most speakers — the change called yeísmo.

Italian has very few of these, and most are exactly this: a silent h added to a form of avere so the eye can tell them apart.

The whole present tense of avere works this way: ho/o, hai/ai, ha/a, hanno/anno. Italian added an h to four verb forms purely so the page would not be ambiguous.

Italian has seven vowels and writes five. For most speakers outside Tuscany the distinction has gone, and then these are simply the same word twice.

In European Portuguese the unstressed o reduces and the s and z fall together, so the two are identical. Brazilians keep them apart.

Unstressed e and o both reduce to the same thing, which is what makes this pair — and it is a standing joke about builders and orchestras.

One word for yesterday AND tomorrow — the tense of the verb is the only thing that tells you which. It sounds like a defect and is not: Hindi is marking 'the day next to this one' and leaving the direction to the grammar. परसों parson does the same for the day two away, in either direction.

Three letters for what Hanoi says as one sound, /z/. The spelling records a 17th-century pronunciation in which d was a soft d, gi was /ʝ/ and r was rolled; the north levelled all three and the alphabet did not follow.

Hanoi merges s and x into /s/. The south keeps s as a retroflex /ʂ/ and hears these as two words.

The third merger: tr and ch are both /c/ in the north. The south keeps tr as a retroflex.

The same syllable, the same huyền tone, two unrelated words — and the two of them are in this site's vocabulary, one under navigation. Context does the work; nobody has ever been sold a road.

năm năm = five years. With about 6,000 possible syllables and every one of them a word, Vietnamese collides like Chinese does — and, like Chinese, it solves it by building two-syllable compounds.

Four words, one syllable, and the textbook example. Three are native and unrelated; the fourth is Chinese 倍. Context does everything.

The clearest case of a distinction the language is losing: vowel length told the two apart for centuries, and nobody under fifty hears it now.

The southern (Gyeongsang) dialects keep 'horse' and 'speech' apart by pitch — the pitch accent Seoul lost.

Both Sino-Korean, from different characters. The pun is a national institution: you can apologise with an apple.

The one true homophone set, made by the ㅐ/ㅔ merger of the last fifty years: spelled apart, said the same by everyone born after 1970. The spelling is now learned as a list — the same thing that happened in Hanoi with d, gi and r.

Three unrelated words, and a well-known riddle. Turkish spelling is phonemic, so its homophones are not spelling accidents but collisions of short native roots.

The noun and the imperative stem meet again: a noun and a verb root of the same shape are the commonest Turkish homonym.

Gül gül! is 'laugh, rose!' or 'laugh, laugh!' — and a girl's name on top. The two words come from two different languages.

One word travelled the Silk Road, the other never left the steppe. A çay bahçesi is a tea garden, and it is usually beside one.

The best-known pun in the language, and it is an accident of the prefix system rather than of spelling. Malay has almost no true homophones — the writing is phonemic and the syllables are full.

There is no set to show. Georgian writes one letter for one sound, has no silent letters, no tones and no vowel-length distinctions — so two different words essentially cannot collide. This entry is here to make the point that the problem is optional.