English Multinyms
63 comments
·March 14, 2025rahimnathwani
Thanks to Warren Kinney for distinguishing the British pronunciation of "new" and "knew"
SamBam
I think in some places one is pronounced "noo" and one is "niew," although honestly I could see either one for either meaning.
walthamstow
This is extremely dependent on dialect and accent, but they don't specify which one they're talking about.
> borough, burro, burrow
Nah, not 'round 'ere they ain't.
bilekas
I've never heard of 'Multinyms' but I am right in thinking they're just homophones ?
robobro
The first line of text after the title:
> multinyms are examples of triple/quadruple/quintuple/sextuple homonyms.
> According to some definitions, a homonym is a word with the same pronunciation as, but different meaning than, another word. Thus, homonyms come in pairs (at least). However, some remarkable homonyms come in triples, as you may here behold.
yubiox
I also maintain a list of these. Here are some I don't see there:
greater grater grader
baron barren bearing
your cees, seas, sees, seize is missing cease
grisly grizzly gristly
pedal peddle petal
I also put since with cense, cents, scents, sense
steal steel still
peal peel pill
If you need help: Ewe mite higher too guise two bee yore assistance.
chrisoverzero
Where are you from that you consider all of these groups to have the same pronunciation?
yubiox
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.
scbrg
Warning, very broadly generalizing now, but here goes...
> 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.
This is my "spot the native English speaker" trick. Some native speakers consistently type "your" no matter if they mean "your" or "you're", and either "their" or "there" whenever they should have used one of "their", "there" or "they're".
My experience is that people who have learned English as a second language don't make this particular mistake as much - although we make tons of other mistakes, of course!
My guess is that the cause of this is that native speakers learn the language mostly by listening, long before they learn to read and write. Consequently, to them a word is primarily defined by its pronunciation. Its spelling is a secondary property that's attached years later.
For second language speakers, a word's spelling is usually something they're exposed to immediately when they learn the word - in many cases even before they learn how it's pronounced. To them, the spelling is what primarily defines a word.
It's a bit frustrating. I tend to get confused when "your" is used in place of "you're", and I usually have to reread the sentence once before I decipher the meaning.
happytoexplain
Hmm, that seems to stray from the general definition of "multinym" as used in the OP.
If we did stick with the idea of pronunciation, some of the examples from your list could be included if we allow regional accents, e.g. steel-still, peel-pill. However, those accents would also include many other sets not in the OP. barren-bearing particularly stands out, because I can't think of any accent that pushes those together audibly.
SilasX
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.
genewitch
Earth?
lelanthran
What part of the world are you from? I ask because this is the first that I've heard that `greater` and `grader` are pronounced the same and now I am curious what country you are in.
For everything in this list, there is at least one word that is not pronounced the same as the other two.
> greater grater grader
> baron barren bearing
> grisly grizzly gristly
> pedal peddle petal
> I also put since with cense, cents, scents, sense
> steal steel still
> peal peel pill
zdunn
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.
thechao
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, ...
the_gipsy
Aaron Earned An Iron Urn
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singularity2001
air, are, e'er, ere, err, heir
I guess I need to go back to school because I pronounce some of them quite differently.
sparsely
Some of these have different pronunciation (depending on accent?), e.g. parish vs perish
ealexhudson
Within UK dialect there would be some significant differences in many of these words, even ignoring the meddle/mettle examples - farrow/pharaoh is easily distinguishable, too.
I would say, though, that to people _outside_ the dialect, there may be many more words that are indistinguishable. Listening to Scots speakers requires a lot more effort for me because to my ears, many of the differences in the words are extremely subtle.
nmstoker
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!
ralferoo
"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...
bradrn
> 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...
I would say that the former (“first vowel in these is”) is ‘more correct’, but it sounds weird because it contains the plural “these” immediately before the singular “is”. What you actually wrote is inconsistent strictly speaking, but it feels better because the verb agrees with the immediately preceding word. (This kind of thing is rather common in languages with agreement.)
ralferoo
* bold, bolled, bowled
I definitely pronounce "bold" and "bowled" differently, the former is one vowel and in the latter I'd say it's two vowels, gliding to a more closed and pursed mouth before the "ld" cluster.
I've never heard of "bolled" before, but just from looking at it, I'd imagine I'd pronounce it with a longer "l" alveolar compared before gliding to the "d". I think I have an old fashioned way of saying "polled" compared to how I hear others saying it.
I might be strange in my pronunciation though, I'd also distinguish between "call" and "caul" in the same way as "bald" and "bowled".
oneeyedpigeon
Some of them are in multiple languages, which surely violates the principle?
Annatar01
Yeah for sure, i think if i use homonyms close to each other i might even try to emphasize the difference. For /ˈparɪʃ/ and /ˈpɛrɪʃ/ its definitely an accent thing.
cjs_ac
Other examples:
* borough, burrow
* call, caul, col
* knot, naught, not
* sic, sick, Sikh
* sics, Sikhs, six
* taught, taut, tot
* cinque, sink
* dew, do
* mall, moll, maul, mawl
ryukoposting
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.
amichal
This reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...
Edit: It's not on the list because its using multiple meanings of the same spelling...
SamBam
The list is precisely words with multiple meanings of the same spelling, but there are only two meanings of "buffalo" that aren't proper names, and this list is about words with three or more meanings.
(As an aside, I've always felt that you can have unlimited "buffalos" in a sentence, without ever using the name of the city, through a process of recursion, but I'm not enough of an authority to get my version into the Wikipedia article...)
amichal
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..."
bryanrasmussen
I prefer the Police version https://medium.com/luminasticity/grammatical-infinities-what...
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tgv
Multinyms, so words with multiple pronounciations/names?
Anyway, I'm not a native speaker, but e.g. air, are, e'er, ere, err, heir does not sound identical to me. The Oxford English Dictionary says: ɛː, ɑː/ə, ɛː, ɛː, əː, ɛː, which makes are and err different. Unfortunately, the author doesn't give a source, so it's probably just his dialect?
randallsquared
The "are" listed is "a metric unit of measure, equal to 100 square meters", not a conjugation of "be". Google pronounces it like "air".
timerol
It's 1/100th of a hectare, and pronounced like the "are" in "hectare".
ndsipa_pomu
I'm a native English speaker (UK) and I'd pronounce some of those words differently. Certainly "air" and "are" sound very different. "e'er" would sound slightly different as it's spoken almost like two syllables, though not quite.
I'd also take issue with "sick" and "Sikh" as Sikh has a slightly different vowel sound - somewhat longer than the short "i" in sic/sick. I'd say that "Sikh" and "seek" are homonyms.
Further down the list, I've just spotted "taught, taut, tot" and "tot" doesn't belong there.
zdunn
> "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
ndsipa_pomu
I'd say that "taught" and "taut" rhyme with "sport", whereas "tot" rhymes with "spot"
bdsa
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)
nmstoker
It's an interesting question as to whether an adopted word gets to be overridden by the preferences of the target!
Suppose the people of Edinburgh didn't happen to like Ee-dan-borghh as the French say it, that doesn't make the French pronunciation "wrong".
ndsipa_pomu
To be fair I don't know any Sikhs, though there is a Sikh community where I live (there's a Sikh temple at the bottom of my road).
I'm going to listen out for how Sikhs pronounce it.
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scottshambaugh
Throw in regional accents and you’ll get many more! Aaron earned an iron urn: https://youtu.be/Esl_wOQDUeE?si=J34OmyDod7GHUrl1
smckk
Real eyes realize real lies.
djoldman
> Sextuplets:
> air, are, e'er, ere, err, heir
When does "are" sound like the rest?
mmooss
It's a unit of measure, not a form of 'to be'.
roryirvine
When referring to the metric unit of area - more commonly seen in the form "hectare".
But this is all very dialect/accent-dependent. Personally, I'd put a bit of a glottal stop in the middle of "e'er", and would say the "err" more like it could be written as "irr", so that set would only be a quadruplet for me.
'Polynyms', surely.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarism_(linguistics)