Name: Homonyms
Uploaded: 2018-03-27T07:07:56.000Z
Duration: 11 min 27 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

There's going to be some word play today. I hope you got your noses strapped on

gave some facts about words that sound the same,

"Blue" the colour, and "blew" the past tense of blow.

A few people responded with, "yea yea yea, they're called homonyms."

There's a reason I didn't call them homonyms, and that reason will be made clear in today's episode.

Let's look at three ways two or more words can be similar.

they can be spelled the same, or they can be sound the same when spoken.

but are pronounced differently and have different spellings,

Synonyms, we've all heard of synonyms before.

have nearly the same meaning, I'll admit that they probably can have different connotations,

like maybe "Buy" is more casual and "Purchase" is more fancy.

*posh voice* "Oh you bought that, but i purchased it hehe because I'm an adult"

Any who, they nearly have the same meaning so they are synonyms.

For those of you who love little fun facts

It often comes up, is there a synonym for synonym?

Not really, but there is a slightly outdated word that isn't used very often.

but really this is pronounced pe-cil-onym.

pecilonym (pronounced)
poecilonym (spelling)

It's a good spelling bee word because it's not spelt the way it sounds. Poecilonym

and poecilonym means various names, various names for the same thing... synonyms.

Poecilonym is a synonym for synonym there you go, fun fact of the day *slot machine winning sound*

What if two or more words mean the same thing and are spelled the same but aren't pronounced alike?

Now we don't really have a word for what those are called, but lets come up with some examples.

They are two ways of pronouncing English's only definite article, so they mean the same thing

however increasingly in American-English especially

"Thee" is being used for emphasis, which tentatively gives it a different meaning.

So "The" and "Thee" might not be like a totally perfect example all the time

sometimes just accent differences can matter, like how I might say "about" and a Canadian might say "aboot"

right, they're spelled the same and they mean the same thing but they sound differently.

Ok what about things that mean the same thing and sound the same but are spelled differently, well these are just spelling variants

For instance, um "Barbecue" spelled like "bar-ba-cue" with a "C", and "Barbeque" spelled like this with a "Q"

Ooh ah, "Barbecue" is not spelt like that it's spelt with an "E"

This is just me words and all, you're welcome

Using a "C" or a "Q" doesn't effect the meaning or the sound of the word it's just a spelling difference

There are two words that also fit into this category that I'm particularly fond of

There's a fantastic uh mnemonic or acronym that you can use to remember how to spell diarrhoea in the UK fashion

The mnemonic is, Dash In A Real Rush Hurry or Else Accident!

Diarrhoea. Now because I'm in the US we don't always use that "O" so I just remember the mnemonic and then I erase the "O"

Perfect, diarrhea is a great example of what might fit into this intersection in our Venn diagram

Ok, now lets look in the very middle of our Venn diagram. If two words are spelled the same, are pronounced the same, and have the same meaning.

both sound the same, spelled the same, and refer to the soup

Not so fun, so lets keep moving on. What we have left are these two circles where words either are spelled the same

look the same written down or they sound the same to the ear when spoken

so the differences are between the way they sound, "Phone" And the way they look, "Graph"

So lets think about words that sound the same but have different meanings and are not spelled the same

Um oh that would be something like what I tweeted

What distinguishes them is that they look (graph) different (hetero)

Now what about words that sound different and mean different things but are spelled the same

If you "tear" apart something I love you might cause me to shed a "tear"

Uh another example is, "Record and "Record"

We can "record" what I'm doing right now, if we do so what we will have made is a "record" of what I did

What distinguishes them is that they have different (hetero) sounds (phones)

Ok so we have these two differences, heterographs look different, heterophones sound different

In the middle of these two we have words that look the same and sound the same but have different meanings

A bank can either be where money is stored or it can be the kind of sloping land near a river, the bank of a river

you wouldn't go get a lone from a river bank, haha

and you wouldn't go fish in a financial bank

Skate, "Skate" means to either slide along but it's also the name of a kind of flat fish

Those words have a very special name, if you want to be really precise

Only words that fall within this part of the Venn diagram are homonyms, same name

Because they sound the same and they're spelled the same

but we can go into even more detail because both of these homonyms "Bank" and "Bank", and "Skate" and "Skate"

if two different meanings of a word share the same origin like the mouth of a river and the mouth of a human

then they are polysemous, but if two words do not have a shared origin but still sound and look the alike well

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Homonyms

accent

illusion

category

shed