The world of English grammar and morphology is a complex, sometimes confusing, and yet fascinating place. You can stumble upon some words that are written the same but mean very different things (homographs) and others that are spelled differently but pronounced identically (homophones), for example. This creates a great deal of confusion among English learners and native speakers alike, as suddenly, we’re having “desert” after dinner and giving away your jewelry (a ring) instead of calling someone on the phone (giving them a ring)...
To clear up some of this confusion and showcase the beauty of the complexity of English grammar, Bruce Worden created a popular website called Homophones, Weakly back in 2011, where he illustrates the difference in meaning and pronunciation between such commonly-confused words. Let’s take a look at 15 of the best word pairs (and sometimes trios) of such confusing words we found there:
To view more of these fun linguistic conundrums, visit Homophones, Weakly.
