Homophones - Say that again!

The word snoop - Ursula Dubosarsky 2009

Homophones
Say that again!

Puns depend for the most part on something called homophones. A homophone is the name people use when you have two or more words that sound exactly the same but have different meanings, and are sometimes spelled differently too. It comes from (you guessed it!) two ancient Greek words—homos, meaning “same,” and phonos, meaning “sound.”

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All languages have homophones. It’s pretty natural, given all the things and ideas in the world, and how most languages use a limited number of sounds. Chinese is thought to have the most homophones of all, but English has quite a few too. You can find lists of them on the Internet, and in libraries there are whole books of them.

Some homophones in English are thought to have come about because of that rather drastic event I told you of before, The Great Vowel Shift (gulp!), when people started changing the way they said their vowels. So, for example, the words meet and meat weren’t homophones originally, as they were pronounced differently (the word meat used to sound more like “mate”). In the same way, whether something is a homophone or not depends on how you pronounce English. For example, the words offal and awful are homophones for some English speakers, but not others. (How offally confusing!)

Yes, well, homophones can be confusing. That’s why when you’re reading you really have to be grateful for all those silent letters and strange spellings that English is full of. (I knew there had to be something good about all that!) In a book or a story, you’ll never mistake a knight for a night, or a symbol for a cymbal, or “I would like a two, too” for “I would like a tutu.

Unless it was a particularly strange story . . .