A mouthful of English

Can you say flower and flour correctly? Believe it or not, they both sound the same in English. But since they have different spellings, it may be difficult to believe their pronunciations are identical. That's why learners often mispronounce one of them. Flour and flower are homophones - words that look different but are pronounced in the same way. There are a lot of homophones in English, and many of them are very common words. Here are some examples. Do you think you can find a word that sounds exactly the same as each of the following? You'll find the answers below - you just have to match them in the correct order.

Homophones are words that sound the same, even though they sometimes have different spellings. Both flower and flour are pronounced /fla ʊə r /. Sea and see both sound /si:/. I and eye don’t have a single letter in common, but we pronounce them in the same way exactly: /a ɪ /. And the list is not short – one/won , no/know , our/hour , son/sun , and blue/blew are just some everyday examples.   It seems that English spelling doesn’t always help us predict pronunciation. This means we should listen to words when we look them up, to make sure we learn how to say them properly. Fortunately, online dictionaries now make this a lot easier. It is also important to be careful when writing, as homophones may be the cause of spelling mistakes – there , their , and they’re might sound the same, but they have different meanings. On the bright side, homophones allow us to play with language. We make plenty of puns and jokes based on wordplay: ‘Why is six afraid of seven?...