English Multinyms

The criteria for my list is that they are taken from real life misspellings, mostly from facebook or youtube comments but also from news media. I have noticed that a lot of people don't bother to consider the proper spelling of words but rather they just spell a word however it sounds to them. So apparently some people pronounce these words the same. Feel free to make your own list of multinyms that fit your own criteria.

In American English, terminal d's and t's usually sound the same unless the speaker takes deliberate care to enunciate them, so that would cover the greater and pedal cases.

Earth?

I'm from South Carolina, USA and I pronounce 'greater' and 'grader' the same. There is a subtle difference and that difference can be more noticeable sometimes, but most of the time I'm saying them the same.

For everything in this list, its incredibly common for these groupings to have the same pronunciation where I live.

Words that are words, backwards, but are not palindromes. My boss is awesome and when I find a new one at 200am and excitedly text him, he congratulates me.

Not, nut, tub, bard, trap, ...

I agree it's heavily accent dependent and I suspect the original compiler wasn't that aware of non-mainstream US accents.

It's interesting that many of these are only the same (initially at least) if you've been sloppy/ignorant in your pronunciation and then those become baked in ways of saying something.

We're due to get a lot more of these given how often you hear influencers guessing at what to me seem fairly mainstream pronunciations!

These are often a way that TTS systems slip up most obviously. A lockdown project I tinkered with several years back was a small (traditional) LM that had been fed with tagged examples and could thus predict fairly well the best sense for a particular case. It made a huge difference to perceived quality. Now of course, many TTS cope with this fairly well but you still hear the off slip up!

"farrow"/"pharaoh" is more than easily distnguishable - to me, the first vowel in these are nowhere even close to the same - I use "a" from "apple" for "farrow" and "ai" from "air" for pharoah, along with a contrast in vowel lengths, again like "apple" and "air".

EDIT: interesting grammar note - as a native speaker, I can't even decide if that should be "first vowel in these is" or "first vowels in these are" or what I actually wrote above which is what seems more natural to me, although immediately stood out to me as grammatically inconsistent when I re-read it after posting...

Maybe some of these aren't just a matter of accent, but the individual. I say "borough" like "bore-oh" but I feel like plenty of people in my area would say "burr-oh" and I wouldn't bat an eye.

Yeah, not a candidate for the list. I thought it wasn't because the list was about > 2 different spellings that sound "identical" but mean different things.

I agree with you and when I (a non-linguist) first learned about this it did occur to me that there was probably some infinite recursive version and it took *some* of the fun out of it. Its' still fun as is this list.

I also suspect there are lots of good examples of whatever a word with multiple meanings with different parts of speech is called. So it should be possible to find...use many "Buffalo buffalo buffalo..."

It's 1/100th of a hectare, and pronounced like the "are" in "hectare".

I also would have said "Sikh" and "seek" are homonyms until recently when I found out that Sikhs' preferred pronunciation is generally to sound closer to "sick" (aspirate the H if you like)

> "e'er" would sound slightly different as it's spoken almost like two syllables, though not quite.

I'm a native English speaker (US). Sometimes when I say "ever"/"never", the 'v' sound drops out. So I end up saying "e'er"/"ne'er" but it sounds like "air"/"nair".

> Further down the list, I've just spotted "taught, taut, tot" and "tot" doesn't belong there.

I pronounce all of these the same