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For the typographical sense, see Homoglyph. For the geometrical sense, see Homography.

This is a Venn diagram showing the relationships between homographs (yellow) and related linguistic concepts.

Look up homograph in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

A homograph (from the Greek: ὁμός, homós, "same" and γράφω, gráphō, "write") is one of a group of words that share the same spelling but have different meanings. When spoken, the meanings may be distinguished by different pronunciations (in which case the words are also heteronyms) or they may not (in which case the words are also both homophones and homonyms^[1]).

Examples:

(1)

bear (verb) – to support or carry
bear (noun) – the animal

In (1) the words are identical in spelling and pronunciation (i.e. they are also homophones), but differ in meaning and grammatical function.

(2)

sow (verb) – to plant seed
sow (noun) – female pig

(2) is an example of two words spelt identically but pronounced differently. Here confusion is not possible in spoken language.

Homograph disambiguation is critically important in speech synthesis, natural language processing and other fields.

Identically-spelled different senses of what is judged to be fundamentally the same word are called polysemes; for example, wood (substance) and wood (area covered with trees).

[edit] More examples

[edit] Notes

1. ^ According to the definition of homonyms as words with the same spelling and pronunciation; however, some sources define homonyms as words with the same spelling or pronunciation, in which case all homographs are also homonyms.

[edit] See also

• Heterography and homography

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