Vocabulary: The 27 most common HOMOPHONES in English

One of the trickiest aspects of learning English is mastering homophones. Homophones are words that sound the same but are spelled differently. A classic example is “there”, “their”, and “they’re”. These three words are pronounced exactly the same way but mean completely different things. Even native English speakers often misspell homophones like “your” and “you’re”, “weather” and “whether”, “then” and “than”, “to”, “too”, and “two”, and the list goes on. Once you know the difference between all of these, you will notice people’s mistakes everywhere. So don’t be that person. Learn homophones once and for all by watching this lesson, and practice by doing the quiz afterwards, at https://www.engvid.com/english-vocabulary-27-common-homophones/

Next, watch my lesson on the worst mistakes that native English speakers make: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ6SXCpasvI

TRANSCRIPT

[Whistles] Wow, what a good book. I should buy another one of these. What? Oh, hi. James from engVid. I was just looking at my book, here, and it seems E has a question. Let's go take a look. So, what's that, E? "I won the race?", "I one the race?" - you don't know the difference? Do you know the difference? Today we're going to work on homophones. I'm going to explain what they are and give you some very common examples that you've probably made mistakes with, but I'm going to help you today to clear them up. You ready? Let's go to the board.

Oh, I said "homophones", and I know there are some of you out there that are grammar nerds, and you're going to say: "Oh, homophones, homograms, dah, dah." I'm going to break it down and say: When we talk about "homo" it means the same; the same. And in this case, a "homograph" is something that is written graphic. It is written like a picture. And when we say "homophone", I'm sure you have a cellphone, like, you know, cellphone. We call it a "phone" because it's the sound. With a cellphone, we deal with sounds; and with homographs we deal with what is written.

Today I really want to concentrate more on homophones, which are words that are going to sound the same... So, let's take a look: Homophones are words that sound the same, but they are different. I forgot a period, here. And an example would be "bare" and "bear". Okay? Or: "whether" and "weather". And I've had many students ask me: What's the difference. They go: "How do you pronounce it? I... I know it looks the same or almost the same." And I say: "It sounds the same." They go: "Why? They mean vastly or very different things." I go: "Yes, you're right, and I'm going to help you see the difference." Now, the problem with a homophone, of course, is when you say it, you don't know how it's spelt, and we use the spelling to tell us that it's a different meaning. The secret to that is context, and I'll go through a couple of examples a little later on and show what I mean by: If you listen to the context, you will have an idea of what they mean.

As I said: homographs are words that are written the same, but have different meanings. But because I'm not going to go into homographs right now, I'm not going to give you the examples. I'm going to give you the examples for the homophones, here. And if you notice, I have something that looks like a calculator or, you know, some buttons you can press on a dial for a phone. And I did that because, in some of these, we can use the homophones to show or illustrate the difference.

So, let's do the first one, here. "One" and "won". If you noticed, E had a problem with: "I won the race?", "I one the race?" To be honest, once again, it's a homophone; the sound is exactly the same, but the context will tell us what the difference is. "One" is clearly number one. I have one friend - a number. But when I won a race, because it's a competition, I can go: "Oh, it's 'won'." That's our first homophone.

We did number one; let's look at number two. Because I'm smart like that, I did "two" and "to". In this case, "two", the number two - you know it? Right? One, two, three. We have another "to", this one, here, which can be used both in an infinitive form and a preposition. Examples. "I want to buy" is an infinitive form. "We're going to the store". Right? We can use that as a preposition "to"... "To" or "from", when we're using it like that.

And this one I like as well: "too", "t-o-o". I say this is what we call there's too many o's or it's excessive in English. Meaning that it's more than you want. An example is: "It's too... My coffee is too hot; I cannot drink it." Cool? All right. That's the number "two". Notice the homophone? They all sound the same. So, if you're going: "Well, why is he teaching us?" It's just so you know, when you see these words, do not change how you say them; the pronunciation is the same, but know when you're writing them or in the sentence you're saying them... […]