Welcome to Dan's Interesting Things!

I've decided to learn a bit of HTML (I don't know why) and build my own website.

I expect that this will change as I improve. I hope it will change, and I hope it will improve! Today is the 11th of December 2024, so let's see what happens.

I like to read, and my brain picks up on homophones: words with different spellings (and meanings) but which are pronounced the same way.

So here we go: a small list of homophones in approximate alphabetical order which I intend to update as I read/think of more.

Where a word is unusual, I will include a little gloss to help clarify its meaning.

Dan's list of homophones:

• air, heir
• aisle, isle
• ale, ail
• apprise (to inform), apprize (to assess the monetary value of something)
• ball, bawl
• bell, belle
• berth, birth
• boar, bore, boor (an uncivilized brute)
• bye, bi
• bite, byte
• bowl, bole (a tree trunk), boll (a seed capsule)
• bow* (of a ship), bough (a big branch)
• bow* (a ribbon), beau (a lover)
• Braille, brail (cord used to tie up a sail)
• breach, breech
• brooch, broach
• broch (a stone tower), brock (an old word for a badger)
• call, caul (a piece of amniotic membrane attached to a baby's head at birth, once considered to be very lucky)
• come, cum (Yeah yeah--I mean the Latin for 'with' as in 'kitchen cum living room'.)
• cowl (a head covering), cawl (a Welsh stew). These words are genuinely homophones.
• cue, queue
• days, daze. I'm setting the rules here, so plurals are allowed ;p
• done, dun ('Dun' is wonderfully homonymous. It can mean a dull brownish grey, or a horse of that colour. It can mean a fort in Ireland--you will see it place names. It can also mean to make persistent demands for money, or someone who does this.)
• earn, urn
• fish, phish (a modern and probably intentional homophone)
• hay, hey
• hays, heys, haze
• hoard (a great stash), horde (an army or large number of things)
• imminent (about to happen), immanent (intrinsic, or part of the essence of something)
• manner, manor
• moo, moue (a pout)
• night, knight
• no, know
• one, won (past tense of 'win')
• pass, parse (examine the parts of a sentence to extract the meaning)
• pea, pee
• pi, pie
• poor, pore**, pour
• rye, wry
• spore, spoor (the scent or track of an animal)
• stationary (standing still), stationery (pens and paper).
• the (when followed by a vowel, as in 'the end'), thee
• to, too, two
• wan (pale and sickly), won (Korean currency)
• way, weigh
• weather, whether, wether (a male sheep, as in 'bellwether')
• why, y (the letter), Wye (the river). Not sure if proper nouns should be included though.
• wicker, whicker (the soft snorting noise a horse makes)
• wither, whither ('to which place')
• woe, woah

And just because today is the 21st of December 2024:

• you'll, Yule
• slay, sleigh

* Words like bow (to rhyme with 'now') and bow (to rhyme with 'know') are heteronyms. We se that the first is homophonous with 'bough', and the second with 'beau'.

**Words like pore, with the same spelling and pronunciation but different meanings (here, a small opening in the skin, or to stare intently at, like to pore over a map) are homonyms. This example is also a homophone with poor and pour.

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