50 Fun Facts About Homonyms

Which animal's name, repeated eight times, forms a grammatical sentence because it is also a New York city and a verb?

Buffalo works three ways: a city in New York, the bison, and a verb meaning to bully. The sentence says bison from that city bully other bison from that city.

Cinderella's glass slipper is sometimes blamed on confusing French 'verre' with a homophone, 'vair', which means what?

Squirrel fur, or 'vair', was a rare fur reserved for nobility, so the theory sounded plausible. Most scholars think Perrault chose glass on purpose.

Which shellfish takes a name from the Latin for 'little mouse', the same root behind the tissue that flexes your arm?

Mussel and 'muscle' both come from Latin 'musculus', because a flexing bicep was thought to look like a mouse. The two spellings were not fully separated until the 1870s.

Which baking staple's name began as a garden word used figuratively to mean the 'finest part'?

Flour was simply the 'flower' of the meal, and English spelled the two words alike for centuries. The modern spelling won out only around 1830, to end the confusion.

Some apartment blocks in China skip the fourth floor because the Chinese word for 'four' sounds like the word for what?

Death and 'four' differ only in tone in many varieties of Chinese, a superstition known as tetraphobia. South Korean hospitals often skip room 4 for the same reason.

Which Irish writer built a stage comedy on a pun between a man's first name and an adjective meaning 'sincere'?

Oscar Wilde turned the homophones 'Ernest' and 'earnest' into The Importance of Being Earnest. German translators are lucky, since 'Ernst' and 'ernst' match as well.

Which breakfast food, named after the Roman goddess of agriculture, sounds exactly like a story told in instalments?

Cereal honours Ceres and first meant any grass grown for edible grain. The breakfast-bowl sense is an American coinage of 1899.

Which military rank sounds exactly like the soft centre of a nut, thanks to an early French spelling with an 'r'?

Colonel arrived as 'coronell' from French, and that pronunciation stuck even after scholars respelled the word in the 1580s to match Italian 'colonnella'.

Which comedy duo's baseball routine 'Who's on First?' relies on players whose names double as question words?

Abbott and Costello often just called the routine 'Baseball'. They first performed it for a national radio audience on The Kate Smith Hour in 1938.

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

Polish changes its vowel sound as well as its meaning when capitalised. The nationality dates from the 1670s, while the unrelated verb comes from Latin 'polire'.

Which word names both a night-flying mammal and, from an unrelated root, the wooden implement swung in cricket?

Bat for the animal is a 1570s alteration of Middle English 'bakke', while the sporting kind goes back to an Old English word for a cudgel.

Which word names both a dog's sharp cry and, through a Scandinavian borrowing, the rough outer skin of a tree?

Bark for a tree's skin came from Old Norse around 1300 and pushed aside the native word 'rind'. The dog's noise is an older English verb that imitates the sound.

Which spelling completes 'The players collected ___ medals', a possessive pronoun that English borrowed from Old Norse?

Their arrived from Old Norse around 1200 and replaced the Old English form 'hiera'. Its sound-alikes are an adverb of place and a contraction of two words.

Which spelling completes 'This soup is ___ salty', a word that began as a stressed form of a shorter preposition?

Too split from 'to' in early Modern English, when the stressed form of the word gained a second letter. German still uses 'zu' for both jobs.

Which word is a heavy metal when it rhymes with 'bed' and a verb meaning to guide when it rhymes with 'need'?

Lead the metal and the verb are unrelated Old English words. Pencil 'lead' is really graphite, which used to be known as black lead.

Which word for a river's edge also names a financial firm, in a sense taken from an Italian moneylender's table?

Bank in the money sense comes from Old Italian 'banca', the table where a moneylender did business. The riverside word is a separate Scandinavian borrowing.

Which word names a burrowing garden mammal, a spy planted deep inside an organisation and a chemist's unit of quantity?

Mole was popularised as spy slang by John le Carré's fiction in 1974, from the idea of burrowing. The chemistry unit is unrelated, a clipping of German 'Molekül' coined by the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald.

Which long-necked wading bird gave English the name of a tall machine that lifts loads on building sites?

Crane has meant a machine with a long arm for moving weights since the late 1200s. The bird words in German, French and Greek took on the same sense.

Which word for a schoolchild also names the dark opening of the eye, after a Latin term for a little doll?

Pupil in the eye sense comes from Latin 'pupilla', a little doll, after the tiny reflection of yourself that appears in another person's eye.

Which word for the inner surface of the hand also names a tropical tree with leaves spread like fingers?

Palm trees were named in Latin for leaves that fan out like the fingers of a hand. The word reached northern Europe, where no such tree grows, through Christianity.

Which culinary herb of the mint family sounds exactly like what a clock measures, and was once spelled without an 'h'?

Thyme was written 'time' and 'tyme' in Middle English around 1300. The modern spelling follows Latin 'thymum', which came from Greek 'thymon'.

Guerrilla, a homophone of a great ape's name, is a diminutive of the Spanish word for what?

War is 'guerra' in Spanish, so a guerrilla is literally a small one. English picked the word up from the Peninsular campaigns of 1808 to 1814, when Spanish bands harried the French.

Which spelling completes the job title 'play___', built on an Old English word for a maker or craftsman?

Wright meant a worker or builder, as in wheelwright and the surname Cartwright, so the title pictures plays being built. Ben Jonson used it as a mocking label in the 1610s.

Which word for a harbour landing place, respelled under French influence, sounds just like the tool that opens a lock?

Quay was written 'key' in Middle English until the spelling was altered to copy French 'quai'. The older pronunciation survived the change.

A word that is its own opposite, such as 'sanction', is nicknamed after which Roman god?

Janus looked both forwards and backwards, so a 'Janus word' faces two ways at once. The more formal label, contronym, was coined in 1962 by Jack Herring.

Which term covers words spelled alike but different in meaning, such as 'wind' the breeze and 'wind' a watch?

Homograph joins the Greek words for 'same' and 'write'. Some dictionaries reserve the label for pairs that are also pronounced differently, as this one is.

Which British duo's hardware-shop sketch 'Four Candles' turns on a shopkeeper mishearing a customer's shopping list?

The Two Ronnies first aired the sketch in 1976, with Ronnie Barker as the customer. He wrote it under the pen name Gerald Wiley.

Which storybook maid, created by author Peggy Parish, causes chaos by taking double-meaning instructions literally?

Amelia Bedelia hears every household order word for word, so a request to switch off the lamps ends with light bulbs carried outdoors. Parish's nephew Herman later continued the series.

Which friend of Romeo, fatally stabbed by Tybalt, jokes that tomorrow he will be a 'grave' man?

Mercutio plays on two senses of 'grave', solemn and a burial place, turning his own death wound into a last joke.

Which month, named in honour of a Roman emperor, becomes an adjective meaning 'majestic' when written without a capital?

August the adjective is stressed on its second syllable, unlike the month. Both go back to Latin 'augustus', the word Rome's first emperor took as a name.

The English town of Reading, unlike the pastime spelled the same way, is pronounced to rhyme with which word?

Bedding is the rhyme, because the Berkshire county town is pronounced 'RED-ing'. A person from the town is known as a Redingensian.

At Chinese New Year, which food is served because the word for it sounds like the word for 'surplus' or 'abundance'?

Fish is 'yú' in Chinese, the same sound as the word for surplus. A New Year phrase wishing for abundance every year therefore sounds identical to one promising a catch every year.

Which spelling completes '___jacket', using an old adjective for tight or narrow that also names a sea channel?

Strait meant tight or close-fitting from about 1300, which also explains 'strait-laced'. The word goes back to Latin 'strictus', meaning drawn tight.

Which verb for levelling a building, from the Latin for 'to scrape', sounds exactly like a word meaning to lift up?

Raze comes from Latin 'radere', to scrape or shave, the root that also gave English 'razor' and 'erase'. The sound-alike verb means almost the exact opposite.

Which spelling names musical notes sounded together, a word that began as a shortening of 'accord'?

Chord was spelled without an 'h' until about 1600, when the letter crept in through confusion with a Greek-derived word for a string. At first it meant just two notes.

Which word for a simplified trade language sounds like a city bird and represents a Chinese pronunciation of 'business'?

Pidgin began as 'pigeon English', the reduced English used in the ports of China in the 1800s. The word itself is a Chinese rendering of 'business'.

Which word for a way into a building becomes a verb meaning to fill with wonder when the stress shifts?

Entrance the verb was built in the 1590s from 'en-' and 'trance', so it has no link to coming through a door. Only the stress tells the two words apart in speech.

Which word for a quantity such as seven is spelled exactly like the comparative form of the adjective 'numb'?

Number meaning 'more numb' keeps a silent 'b', so the two words look identical but are pronounced differently. Linguists call such pairs heteronyms.

Which verb means both 'to split apart' and 'to cling closely', because two separate Old English verbs grew alike?

Cleave descends from Old English 'cleofan', to split, and 'clifian', to stick fast. A butcher's cleaver takes the first sense.

Which spelling names the proofreader's mark showing where to insert text, from the Latin for 'there is lacking'?

Caret is a Latin verb form that proofreaders adopted in the 1680s. The sound-alike spellings measure gemstones and gold purity, or grow in the vegetable patch.

Which term do linguists use when one word has several related senses, in contrast to chance look-alikes such as 'bear'?

Polysemy covers senses that share a history, so dictionaries list them under a single headword. Unrelated look-alikes are given separate entries.

Which word for a misheard phrase comes from an American writer's childhood mishearing of a Scottish ballad?

Mondegreen was the surname of a noble lady the writer imagined she heard dying beside the earl in the ballad. Her essay naming the effect ran in Harper's Magazine.

Every character of the poem 'Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den' is pronounced 'shi' when read aloud in which language?

Mandarin has so few distinct syllables that only tones separate the words of the tale, so it is gibberish to a listener. Read in Cantonese, the same characters no longer all sound alike.

Which actor, best known as Herman Munster, wrote and illustrated the homophone picture book 'The King Who Rained'?

Fred Gwynne based his picture books on the way children mishear adult phrases. A companion title, A Chocolate Moose for Dinner, seats an antlered guest at the table.

Which term describes a word such as 'march' or 'turkey' whose meaning changes when it begins with an upper-case letter?

Capitonym is itself a blend of 'capital' and the suffix '-onym'. A few such words, like 'job' and the biblical Job, change pronunciation as well.

Under the rule against scientific homonyms, the platypus lost the genus name 'Platypus' to which earlier-named animal?

A beetle genus already held the name, so the mammal was reclassified as Ornithorhynchus, meaning 'bird-snout'. The discarded label meant 'flat-foot'.

The word 'bridal', a homophone of a horse's headgear, began as a noun for a wedding feast that literally meant what?

Bride ale named the feast after the drink that flowed at it. The ending was later confused with the suffix '-al', which turned the old noun into an adjective.

Which language takes a name from the Turkic word for 'camp' that also gave English 'horde', a homophone of 'hoard'?

Urdu is short for a phrase meaning 'language of the camp'. The same Turkish word, 'ordu', seems to have gained an 'h' on its way west into English.

Which medieval warrior's title sounds just like the hours of darkness, although Middle English voiced the first letter?

Knight kept a sounded 'k' through Old and Middle English. The 'kn-' cluster faded to a plain 'n' in standard speech by about 1750, after a century of weakening.

Which word is the front of a ship when it rhymes with 'cow' and an archer's weapon when it rhymes with 'go'?

Bow for a ship's front came in the 1300s from a Norse or Low German source. The archer's kind is Old English 'boga', a word for anything bent or arched, rainbows included.