Being Forward with my Foreword
Homophones, also called homonyms, are words that sound alike but have different meanings and, usually, spellings. Some are near misses, like “desperate” and “disparate”: the first of the two begins with a rhyme for “desk”, the second with “disk.” But because most of us don’t enunciate as clearly as we should, and regional accents can cause words that shouldn’t sound similar to do so, I’ve included quite a few of them.

And disagreements will continue, like the lengthy discussion I had with a good friend and fellow editor about the pronunciation of “axis.” She appends the “k” to the “a-” and the “s” to the “-is,” leading to the pronunciation “ak-sis” shown in dictionaries. I consider the “x” a diphthong, pronounced “ks,” leading to the pronunciation “a-ksis.”

Such disputes about the spoken language are one thing; writers should bear in mind that computer spell-checking systems generally can’t determine which of several words you mean, only whether it’s spelled correctly or not; as a result, if you write “fair” when you mean “fare,” your spell checker won’t save you from the busybody who emails you to complain about the misused word in your ad, website, blog, newspaper column, or wherever it showed up. (As a long-standing busybody myself, I know the syndrome only too well.)

In this collection, each set of homophones is listed alphabetically; in a few cases the second or third word is also listed, in a sort of reverse dictionary (for example, both “right” and “write” appear with their other shared homophones “rite” and “wright”). I’ve also included a few familiar French and Spanish words (e.g., "au lait" and "ole") that we English speakers hear and can easily confuse. And some words show up in several lists, being extraordinarily prone to misuse.

A.D. Reed, author of Reed’s Homophones

Reed’s Homophones available from Pisgah Press, LLC
ISBN 978-0-615-59723-2 $10.00
http://www.pisgahpress.com/authors/a-d-reed/
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