A handy guide to homophones, homonyms, and homographs

Never be outsmarted by your fourth-grade daughter again!

Fun fact: Duck and duck are homonyms
(Image credit: Bob Levey/Getty Images, Thinkstock)

Suede and swayed. Mine and mine. They're homophones, right? No, wait — homonyms? Are homophone and homonym synonyms? And what's the deal with homographs, anyway? How do they fit in? At least you're not in fourth grade anymore, so you don't have to worry about it. Unless...

...you're a fourth-grade teacher! Or you have a son or daughter in fourth grade. In that case, you've come to the right place to straighten out your phones, nyms, and graphs of the homo variety once and for all.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us

Neal Whitman is a columnist for the online resource Visual Thesaurus, and an occasional guest writer for the podcast "Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing." He teaches ESL composition at The Ohio State University, and blogs at Literal-Minded, where he writes about linguistics from the point of view of a husband and father.