I visited the silver mine and museum in Kutná Hora, Czech Republic, a few years ago. I registered for the museum tour, which was scheduled to be presented in Czech, but I was the only person who showed up, so the tour guide generously offered to switch to English as his English was better than my Czech. We helped each other along, and when he was describing something he didn’t know the English word for, he pointed to it, and I provided the English word.
The translation he found laugh-out-loud funny was “chest”: “You mean that this” – pointing to an antique wooden chest and gasping with laughter – “is the same as this?” – thumping his chest. This opened up a side conversation on the English word "coffer" and its equivalents in Czech and German. It was so nice to meet a fellow word nerd in my travels!
The languages referred to as English draw on many global sources. That is one reason it has so many homophones and homonyms, not to mention words that are nearly so. "Chest" has only one spelling, but that isn't always the case.
Homophones are words that sound the same and might or might not have the same spelling, for example write, rite, and right.
Homonyms are words that have the same spelling or pronunciation but have different meanings: wind (rhymes with “tinned”, moving air) and wind (rhymes with “mind”, to move nonlinearly; e.g., a river that winds).
Spelling and grammar checkers are indispensable tools for anyone editing their own or someone else’s text, and artificial intelligence (AI) is enhancing the possibilities of these apps. But they can’t yet, and maybe never will, replace human intelligence and understanding.
(I’m sure I will get into AI-related topics in this blog, partly because I’ve always been a technology geek and find new developments inherently interesting, but also because they are affecting and will affect my and my children’s work and life.)
Homophones and near-homophones are a common source of text errors, in my experience. Here are a few I have seen:
- A right of innocent passage allows a ship to pass through international waters; a rite of passage can be part of growing up.
- If you want to control something, you might want to rein it in. A king or queen reigns. This is a common error as few of us use horse-drawn carriages these days, and even fewer of us are royalty, so the metaphor is somewhat obtuse.
- You use stationery for writing; you use a stationary bike as secondary clothing storage.
- If your wine complements your meal perfectly, you might compliment the sommelier.
It’s best to make several passes through your document as you’re checking for errors because it’s hard to read for clarity and meaning if you’re focusing on commas. Think about word use, and get out or link to a dictionary or two to make sure that your message is clear.
Copyright: Moira Calder, 2025
Image generated by DALL-E
