A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning. The words may be spelled the same, such as rose (flower) and rose (past tense of "rise"), or differently, such as carat, caret, and carrot, or two and too. A rose is a perennial flowering Shrub or vine of the Genus Rosa, within the family Rosaceae, that contains over 100 species The carat is a unit of Mass used for measuring gems and Pearls Currently a carat is defined as exactly 200  mg (0 Caret is the name for the symbol ^ in ASCII and some other Character sets Its Unicode code point is U+005E and its ASCII code in hexadecimal is 5E The carrot ( Daucus carota subsp sativus, Etymology: Middle French carotte, from Late Latin carōta, from Greek karōton A short example of a homophone is the words "know" and "no". Note that they are pronounced the same but have different meanings. A homophone is a type of homonym, although sometimes homonym is used to refer only to homophones that have the same spelling but different meanings. In linguistics a homonym is one of a group of words that share the same pronunciation but have different meanings and are usually spelled differently The term may also be used to apply to units shorter than words, such as letters or groups of letters which are pronounced the same as another letter or group of letters.

Homophones are often used to create puns and to deceive the reader (as in crossword puzzles) or to suggest multiple meanings. A pun (or paronomasia) is a Phrase that deliberately exploits confusion between similar-sounding Words for humorous or Rhetorical The last usage is common in poetry and creative literature. Literature is the Art of written works Literally translated the word means "acquaintance with letters" (from Latin littera letter An example of this is seen in Dylan Thomas's radio play Under Milk Wood: "The shops in mourning" where mourning can be heard as mourning or morning. Dylan Marlais Thomas (27 October 1914 – 9 November 1953 was a Welsh poet who wrote exclusively in English Another vivid example is Thomas Hood's poem "Faithless Sally Brown":

His death, which happen'd in his berth,

At forty-odd befell:

They went and told the sexton, and

The sexton toll'd the bell. Thomas Hood ( 23 May 1799 &ndash 3 May 1845) was a British Humorist and Poet.

Homophones in the context of word games are also known as "oronyms". This term was coined by Gyles Brandreth and first published in his book The Joy of Lex (1980), and it was used in the BBC programme Never Mind the Full Stops, which also featured Brandreth as a guest. Gyles Daubeney Brandreth (born 8 March 1948) is an English Author, ex- Politician and Media personality.

Examples of "oronyms" (which may only be true homophones in certain dialects of English) include

'mint spy' vs 'mince pie';

'ice cream' vs. 'I scream'

'stuffy nose' vs. 'stuff he knows';

'euthanasia' vs. 'youth in Asia';

'situation' vs. 'sit, you Asian';

'i. c. u. ' vs. 'I see you'.

'depend' vs. 'deep end'

'Grace Gale' vs. 'Gray Scale'

'the sky' vs. 'this guy'

Two oronyms appear in "Ana's Song (Open Fire)" by Silverchair. Silverchair is an Australian Alternative rock band. The band formed as Innocent Criminals in Newcastle, New South Wales, in 1992 While they initially sound like mondegreens, reading the lyrics will reveal that this is not the case. A mondegreen is the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase typically a standardized phrase such as a line in a poem or a lyric in a song due to near homophony. The first line of the song, "Please die Ana, for as long as you're here we're not", also sounds very much like "Please Diana, . . . ", which confuses people into believing that "Ana" is a person, when really it is just a nickname for anorexia. The next verse is "And Ana wrecks your life, like an anorexia life", which is another oronym that proves "ana's" real meaning. Anorexia Nervosa is a psychiatric Diagnosis that describes an Eating disorder characterized by low Body weight and Body image distortion

American comedian Jeff Foxworthy frequently uses oronyms in his Appalachian routine. Jeff Foxworthy (born September 6, 1958) is an American Stand-up comedian and Actor. Notable examples include, "Initiate: My wife ate two sandwiches, initiate (and then she ate) a bag o' tater chips. " and "Mayonnaise: Mayonnaise (Man, there is) a lot of people here tonight. "

Mad Gab is a team oronym solving game. Mad Gab is a game created by Mattel in which there are at least two teams and 2 to 12 players

Use in psychological research

Pseudo-homophones

Pseudo-homophones are non-words that are phonetically identical to a word. Phonetics (from the Greek φωνή ( phonê) "sound" or "voice" is the study of the physical sounds of human speech Pseudo-homophone pairs are pairs of phonetically identical letter strings where one string is a word and the other is a non-word. For example, groan/grone and crane/crain are pseudo-homophone pairs, whereas plane/plain is a homophone pair since both letter strings are recognised words, both types of pairs are used in lexical decision tasks to investigate word recognition. The lexical decision task is a procedure used in many Psychology and Psycholinguistics experiments

Use as ambiguous information

Homophones where one spelling is of a threatening nature and one is not (e. g. slay/sleigh, war/wore) have been used in studies of anxiety as a test of cognitive models that those with high anxiety tend to interpret ambiguous information in a threatening manner. Anxiety is a physiological and psychological state characterized by Cognitive, Somatic, Emotional and Behavioral components See Mogg K, Bradley BP, Miller T, Potts H, Glenwright J, Kentish J (1994). Interpretation of homophones related to threat: Anxiety or response bias effects? Cognitive Therapy and Research, 18(5), 461-77.

Dreams

Homophones also appear sometimes in dreams; see dream pun. A dream pun is a Pun that occurs in a Dream. They are an important concept in Dream interpretation.

External links

• Alan Cooper's Homonym List (actually homophones, not homonyms, as he himself explains)
• Homonyms and Homophones - a basic but useful list
• List of 441 British-English homophones. Ian Miller. Retrieved on February 15, 2008.

Wiktionary

• List of dialect-independent homophones
• List of dialect-dependent homophones