40 Fun Facts About Homographs

A grammatical English sentence made of one word repeated eight times uses the name of which New York city?

Buffalo works because the one word is a city, the bison that live there and a verb meaning to bully. The sentence has been discussed in print since 1967.

Which word names a spiny-finned freshwater fish and, said with a different vowel, the lowest male singing voice?

Bass the fish began as Old English 'bærs', a perch, named for its bristly dorsal fins. The musical word arrived separately from Late Latin 'bassus', meaning low.

Which nationality, when written without its capital letter, becomes a verb meaning to rub a surface until it shines?

Polish changes its sound as well as its meaning with the capital letter: the nationality has a long 'o'. The verb comes from Latin 'polire', to make smooth.

Which everyday verb form is spelled exactly like the plural of the word for a female deer?

Does is two words in one spelling: said 'duz' it is a form of 'do', and said 'doze' it means more than one doe. The deer word goes back to Old English 'da'.

Which word means a rip in cloth when it rhymes with 'hair' and a sign of crying when it rhymes with 'fear'?

Tear the eye-drop and tear the rip have been separate words since Old English, 'tear' for a drop and 'teran' for pulling apart. Only the spelling has merged.

Which word names a heavy grey metal and, said with a longer vowel, the act of guiding others?

Lead the metal and lead the verb are unrelated Old English words, 'lead' and 'lædan'. The metal also lent its name to pencil 'lead', which is really graphite.

Which word is a unit of time when stressed on the first syllable and means 'tiny' when stressed on the last?

Minute comes both ways from Latin 'minutus', small. A minute was the 'first small part' of an hour in medieval Latin, and the next division down became the second.

Which animal, whose name probably first meant 'flapper', shares its spelling with a club swung in baseball?

Bat the animal was 'bakke' in Middle English and only became 'bat' in the 1570s. The club is an older, unrelated word, used of cricket since 1706.

Which word rhymes with 'cow' as a female pig but with 'go' as a verb for planting seeds?

Sow the pig and sow the verb are unrelated words. The animal's name goes back to an ancient root that may simply imitate a grunt, the same root that gave English 'swine'.

Which bird's name, said with a different vowel, doubles as a past tense of the verb 'dive'?

Dove as a past tense is mainly American, and the bird's name is perhaps related to old Germanic words for diving. Why a pigeon should be a diver is not clear.

Which part of the eye, named from the Latin for 'little doll', is spelled like a word for a school student?

Pupil of the eye was named for the tiny image of yourself reflected in another person's eye, like a little doll. The student sense comes from the related Latin word for an orphan or ward.

Which word names both a fragrant herb and, from the same Latin root as 'money', a place where coins are struck?

Mint for coins comes from Latin 'moneta', also the origin of 'money', while the herb comes from Greek 'minthe'. In myth Minthe was a nymph turned into the plant.

Which sweet fruit, named with a Greek word that also means 'finger', is spelled like a day on the calendar?

Date the fruit is said to be named for its finger-like shape, while the calendar date comes from Latin 'data', given. Romans closed their letters with 'given' and the day.

Which word for a writing tool comes from the Latin for 'feather' and is spelled like a small animal enclosure?

Pen comes from Latin 'penna', a feather, because pens were long cut from quills. The farmyard pen is an unrelated Old English word of uncertain origin.

Which word names both a place of worship and the flat area on each side of the forehead?

Temple the building comes from Latin 'templum', but the temple of the head comes from 'tempus', probably first meaning a thin stretch of skin. Latin kept them as two separate words.

Anglo-Saxon poets called the sea the bath of which animal, whose name is spelled like a wax stamp on a document?

Seal the animal is Old English 'seolh', and 'seolhbæð' was a poetic name for the sea. The stamp is an unrelated word from Latin 'sigillum', a little picture.

Which word is an injury when it rhymes with 'crooned' and the past tense of 'wind' when it rhymes with 'found'?

Wound the injury goes back to Old English 'wund' and has nothing to do with winding a clock. Spelling alone makes the two look like one word.

Which word is an arid wasteland as a noun and, stressed on the second syllable, a verb meaning to abandon?

Desert in both senses comes from Latin 'deserere', to forsake: a desert was literally a thing abandoned. In the 18th century the wasteland was often spelled 'desart'.

Which punctuation mark shares its spelling, though not its Greek origin, with the body's large intestine?

Colon the mark comes from Greek 'kōlon', a limb or clause, while the gut is Greek 'kolon' with a short first o. Latin borrowed both, and English ended up spelling them alike.

Which freshwater fish is spelled like a verb meaning to find fault?

Carp the verb began as Old Norse 'karpa', to brag, and turned toward petty complaining in the late 14th century. The fish name is unrelated and arrived through Old French.

Which term describes homographs that are pronounced differently, such as 'row' a boat and 'row' meaning a quarrel?

Heteronym joins the Greek for 'different' and 'name', and the label is only as old as 1889. Many pairs, such as the noun and verb 'record', are one word whose stress has shifted.

Which word for a doorway becomes, with the stress on its second syllable, a verb meaning to fill with wonder?

Entrance the verb was built in the 1590s from 'en-' and 'trance': to put someone into a trance. The doorway word comes from French 'entrer', to enter.

Which verb meaning to carry on after a pause is spelled, minus two accents, like a summary of someone's career?

Resume and résumé both come from Latin 'resumere', to take up again; the French noun first meant a summing up. The career sense is only recorded from the 1940s.

Which word for a small motorbike is also, said as one syllable, the past tense of a verb meaning to sulk?

Moped was coined in Swedish around 1952 from the words for motor and pedals, because the earliest models had both. Read as one syllable, it is just 'mope' in the past tense.

Which word names both an underground drain and, rhyming with 'grower', a person who stitches cloth?

Sewer the drain goes back to Latin 'ex', out, and 'aqua', water: literally something that makes water flow. The other sewer is simply 'sew' with '-er' added.

Which everyday maths word is also, with a silent 'b', the comparative form of an adjective meaning without feeling?

Number read as 'nummer' means more numb. The silent 'b' is a 17th-century addition: 'numb' began as 'nome', meaning taken or seized, as if by cold.

Which month, named after a Roman emperor, becomes an adjective meaning majestic when stressed on the last syllable?

August the month honours the emperor Augustus, who had taken his title from the Latin adjective 'augustus'. Month and adjective are one word that reached English by two roads.

Which South American capital gave its name to a bean that US speakers pronounce with a different first vowel?

Lima beans are said to owe the name to export boxes from Spanish-ruled Peru that were labelled with their place of origin. US speakers say the bean 'LIE-ma' but the capital 'LEE-ma'.

Which book of the Bible, named after its central figure, is spelled like an everyday word for paid work?

Job the biblical name rhymes with 'robe', so on the page only the capital letter separates it from a day's work. The work word began in the 1550s as a 'jobbe of worke'.

Which word for a serve-yourself meal is spelled like a verb meaning to strike repeatedly, as strong winds do?

Buffet the meal is French for a sideboard and only came to mean the food served from one by 1951. The verb, said 'BUFF-it', comes from an Old French word for a slap.

Words such as 'rain', 'reign' and 'rein', which share a sound but not a spelling, are best described as what?

Homophones share a pronunciation, while homographs share a spelling. A word such as 'rose', the flower and the past tense of 'rise', manages to be both at once.

Which plural, said two ways, covers both a woodcutter's chopping tools and the reference lines of a graph?

Axes ends in 'iz' as the plural of axe and in 'eez' as the plural of axis. The same thing happens to 'bases', which serves both base and basis.

Which word means 'with the mouth wide open' and, said with three syllables, a Greek term for selfless love?

Agape the adverb is simply 'a-' plus 'gape', first recorded in the 1660s. The Greek noun is unrelated, and early Christians also used it for a shared meal called a love feast.

Which word for a muddy swamp is spelled like a verb, rhyming with 'rough', used when a snake sheds its skin?

Slough the swamp gave John Bunyan his 'Slough of Despond' in 1678. The skin-shedding word is unrelated: it first named the cast-off skin itself, in the 14th century.

Which word describes workers who have joined a labour organisation or, read differently, atoms that carry no charge?

Unionized is 'union-ized' on a picket line and 'un-ionized' in a laboratory. Some style guides ask for a hyphen in the chemical sense to keep the two apart.

Which term describes a word such as 'march' or 'may' whose meaning changes when its first letter is upper case?

Capitonym blends 'capital' with the suffix '-onym'. Some pairs are coincidences, while others, such as 'Catholic' and 'catholic', share one Greek root meaning universal.

Which verb is really two Old English words in one spelling, one meaning to split apart and the other to cling?

Cleave descends from Old English 'cleofan', to split, and 'clifian', to stick fast. Once the forms merged, English had a verb that is its own opposite, known as a Janus word.

Which arithmetic verb is spelled like an adverb, ending in an 'ee' sound, that means 'in several ways'?

Multiply the adverb is 'multiple' plus '-ly', as in a multiply talented player. The verb is far older and comes from Latin 'multiplicare', to increase.

Which term covers related senses of one word, such as 'wood' the material and 'wood' the forest?

Polysemes are branches of one word, so dictionaries usually list them under a single headword. Homographs of separate ancestry, like the two meanings of 'bear', get separate entries of their own.

In a so-called IDN homograph attack, fraudsters use look-alike letters from other alphabets to forge what?

Web addresses can mix alphabets, so a Cyrillic 'а' can replace a Latin 'a' and send victims to a fake site. Two researchers in Israel described the trick in 2001 with a copy of microsoft.com.