Homophones…Putting the Brakes on Your Bad Writing Habits - Before Your Clients Take a Break From You!

Yes, we can almost hear your audible groans and eye-rolling from reading that title, but being spelling and grammar nerds comes with very few perks (we tend to annoy people!), so we take our kicks where we can get them!

Without a doubt, homophones are some of the most confusing words in the English language to learn and use correctly. In case you missed the memo or the inference in our witty blog title, a homophone is a term used to describe the situation where two or more words are pronounced the same but have different meanings. In most cases, the spelling is similar, as with the brake and break example above. However sometimes the spellings can even be identical - rose (to rise) and rose (the flower) being one such example.

Homophones are some of the most misused words in written text. Even in professional websites and company communications, you’d be surprised how many we see. And on a personal level, if we’re looking for products and services online and see them in your web copy or email replies, it’s pretty much game over and we start to look elsewhere. That may sound petty we know, but it’s important to get the little things right when you write (lol, this is fun, see what we did there?!). What you put out there in the online world says a lot about your company. So if you can’t even get the basics of language down on your website and in your communications, we take that as a glaringly obvious sign that your attention to detail in other areas may also be somewhat lackluster.

Most people are relatively on the ball with many of the easier homophones, and depending on what industry you work in, some you’ll never have a problem with – we hope! For example, a pilot should certainly know the difference between a hangar and a hanger, and the divers among you shouldn’t have any problems distinguishing between a yolk and a yoke! Musicians would hope to have a successful band rather than being banned from performances, and those in the beauty industry know the difference between a scent, and being sent to find one!

All this being said, it tends to be a certain set of common homophones that trip people up time and time again. There are hundreds of them so we obviously can't go over them all, but here’s a list of some common offenders, and a selection of those that particularly get our goat when we see them being misused.

They’re, Their and There

'They're' is the contraction for ‘they are’. 'Their' is an indicator of possession by a group, as in ‘their meeting’, or ‘their flight’. 'There' refers to a place, like when you tell your friends ‘I’ll meet you there’.

Your and You're

This is an easy one to explain, as the difference here is simply in whether you own or have something, or are something, the word 'you’re' being a contraction of ‘you are’.  For example ‘You’re going to love Linzi’s new blog. Your team will really benefit from it.’  Yes, shameless self-promotion we know, but we just can’t help ourselves!

We won’t dip into it just now since these two are the biggest offenders, but you’d get bonus points for knowing the other two homophones in this group – yaw, and yore!

Whether and Weather

The easiest way to get this one right is to think of the word ‘whether’ as being interchangeable with the word ‘if’, and the weather being a term to describe climatic/temperature conditions regarding the sun, clouds, and rain, etc. As in, ‘It depends on whether the weather conditions are suitable’.

There is another homophone in this group, so even more bonus points for you if you know that a ‘wether’ is a castrated ram. English really is fascinating, huh?!

Its and It’s

This one stumps even some really proficient writers, as the rule of possession is a little skewed. The common mistake here is to think the apostrophe followed by a letter 's' is a sign of ownership, whereas actually it’s a contraction of ‘it is’. So with this couple of homophones ‘its’ is the possessive version of the word. So you could say about a car, for example, that ‘Its sunroof will automatically close when it’s raining’.

To, Too and Two

OK, so most of you are down with one of these being a number, it’s the other two (man, we really are milking the word nerd comedy now!) that tend to confuse people. The word ‘to’ is a preposition with several other alternative meanings including “toward” and “until”. On the other hand, ‘too’ is an adverb that signals too much or an excess of something, or can be used interchangeably with “also”. So you could say ‘I’m not going to work today because I’m too sick’.

We could go on forever on this topic, but don’t worry, we won’t. Our little nerdy brains can’t take the excitement, and you are probably losing patience with our cheesy humour by now! Are there any other big homophone blunders you think we’ve missed, though? Which ones irritate you the most? Were there any you didn’t know? We’d love to hear your feedback and comments! In the meantime, we’ll leave you with these little pearls of wisdom….

We don't know where to go to wear our holiday clothes.

You may lose your footing on the loose gravel. 

You’re not allowed to sing aloud.

We were very bored at our board meeting.

You’re welcome!