Homonyms

Commonly Confused Words

Have you ever mixed up “two,” “too” and “to”; “than” and “then”; or “their,” “there” and “they’re”? You’re not alone. In our Commonly Confused Words story, Flocabulary highlights all these homonyms and more.

Homonyms are words that are spelled or sound the same, but have different meanings. There are two subsets in the category of homonyms, homographs and homophones.

Homographs are two words that are spelled the same but have different meanings. Some examples:

live (v) / live (n)
bear (n) / bear (v.)
rebel (n) / rebel (v.)
bow (n) / bow (v)
bat (baseball, n) / bat (baseball, v)/ bat (animal, n)
cool (n) / cool (v)

See more English homographs here.

Homophones are words with different spelling and different meaning, but have the same sound. Some examples:

it’s / its
there / their / they’re
we’ll / wheel
he’ll / heel
I / eye / aye
sees / seas / seize

See more homophones here.

In addition to our story about homonyms, our second grade Word Up vocabulary video “Penguin Rock Band” includes several sets of homonyms, if you’d like to give your students more practice.

And for more from Flocabulary, listen to our fifteen other Grammar rap songs.