Thursday, January 14, 2010

Quadruple Homophone.

Where
Ware
Wear
Were

Interestingly this isn't the only Quadruple homophone in English. I know of another one. Can anybody guess it. (It's insanely cheap).

4 comments:

Unknown said...

"Were" (as in "werewolf") is actually pronounced "weer" (rhymes with "deer").

Tatarize said...

wear
  /wɛər/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [wair]

were
  /wɜr; unstressed wər; Brit. also wɛər/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [wur; unstressed wer; Brit. also wair]

It's still a homophone even if that pronunciation isn't universal. For example there is another quad in: pause, paws, pores, pours -- But, I pronounce the latter two "poors" and so it doesn't quite work for me. Likewise you can get another homophone out of "your" if you pronounce "yaw" like "your" which is sort of Bostonian.

The only one out of a list that I just googled a second ago that has all words and seems all properly pronounced is right, rite, write, wright. Though, peak, peek, peke, pique is pretty nice.

http://www.bifroest.demon.co.uk/misc/homophones-list.html

Pure Bliss said...

metal, meddle, mettle, and medal

My brother pointed these out recently. ;)

Tatarize said...

I had where's, wears, weres, and wares in mind. That way it uses "wares" rather than "ware" which sounds better and might as well use the plural of "were" if we're using that word. Then we have only one iffy word rather than two.