Homophones in English

Every pair below is genuinely identical in sound, and the audio proves it: play both and you hear one thing twice, because phonetically they are one thing. That is worth doing once, because seeing two spellings makes people hear a difference that is not there.

they’re. In speech this is identical to there and their . The synthesiser here reads the contraction as two syllables, so they're comes out longer than it should. Trust the pair above, not this one.

one and won. These are identical in American English, both /wʌn/. The British voice used here gives one a different vowel from won , so whether they match depends on which accent you have selected — try both.

A general point worth carrying away: synthesised speech is generated from a fixed dictionary, so contractions and irregular words are where it is least reliable. On those, a human dictionary beats any text-to-speech engine, including this one.

These get grouped with homophones but are audibly different. Confusing them in writing is a spelling problem; confusing them in speech is a pronunciation problem, and the fix is different.

Whether two words rhyme can depend entirely on who is speaking. These are the well-known cases. Two of them you can hear here by switching accent; the other two the synthesised voices do not reproduce, and are marked accordingly.

The pattern behind the third pair is covered in American vs British pronunciation.

The mirror image of a homophone: one spelling, two pronunciations, decided by meaning. The audio below can only play one of the two, so the note tells you what the other sounds like.

A whole family of homographs differ only by which syllable is stressed — a REcord versus to reCORD. That set has its own guide: English word stress.

Every word above is a button. Set the accent and voice you want on the main screen, then come back — the guides use whatever you chose. To hear two accents against each other, use Compare; to test whether you can actually hear a contrast, use the listening quiz.