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.

You might have seen some English words written differently in different contexts. English is spoken all over the world, which explains the existence of many varieties with their own characteristic features – like the differences in spelling found between British and American English. The u in words like colour, flavour, and neighbour , for example, disappears in American English – where we find color, flavor, and neighbor . The American spelling tends to be simpler, somehow closer to the way words are pronounced. This can be noticed if we compare British metre, programme, aesthetic, and travelling with American meter, program, esthetic, and traveling . It’s OK to spell either way, as both varieties are correct. However, it’s usually advisable to show consistency using one or the other in the same piece of writing.

Most plurals in English are formed by adding –s or –es to a singular noun as in song s , sandwich es , and glass es . Many of these forms, however, show irregular spellings. Leaf, life and half , for instance, become leaves, lives and halves . The different endings in holidays and dictionaries are explained by a simple rule – whether there is a vowel or a consonant before the final –y in the singular. But it isn’t so easy to see why the plural forms of pian o and tomato are, respectively, pianos and tomatoes . There are also other kinds of irregularities, some of which are found in everyday words like woman-women , man-men , and child-children . Similarly, mice, feet and teeth are the plural forms of mouse, foot and tooth . Pence is the plural of penny – usually referring to sums of money, while the regular form pennies tends to be used to name one-penny coins. And to talk about more than one person , we generally use the term people . Some words, on t...

In English it is easy to find words with different spellings that sound exactly the same, like son and sun or no and know . On the other hand, some words are pronounced differently although they share the same spelling. This is not so frequent, but it can be a bit more puzzling. Bow sounds /b əʊ / when you use it to play the violin, or when you shoot an arrow with it. Just like the bow in rainbow . If you bend your head as a sign of respect, however, you bow – but it sounds /ba ʊ /. Another example is the verb read , pronounced /ri:d/ in the infinitive and in the simple present, but /red/ in the simple past and in the past partic iple.     The more English you know, the easier it becomes to predict pronunciation when you see a new word written. But spelling doesn’t always help, so I prefer to trust a good dictionary instead.

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?...