English homophones
allowed/aloud
"allowed" is a verb; "aloud" is an adverb - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "allowed" arrives as a verb, while "aloud" is an adverb. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "al" then splits - "allowed" (7 letters) vs "aloud" (5).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across allowed, aloud: adlo. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
allowed
7 letters · 3 vowels · shape VCCVCVC
Inventory adelow · private ew
aloud
5 letters · 3 vowels · shape VCVVC
Inventory adlou · private u
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "allowed" when you mean: simple past and past participle of allow
- Write "aloud" when you mean: With a loud voice, or great noise; loudly; audibly.
Known mistypes of these spellings
Edit-distance variants recorded against this cluster: useful when a search or OCR feed lands on the wrong form.
Each spelling
Nearby English homophone groups
What to do next
You've reviewed the 2-spelling cluster (allowed, aloud). Here's where to go from here.
- "allowed" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #985 in English). Full entry
- Among English homophone groups, a cluster of 2 spellings ranks #133 by size (1,007 groups in this vintage). Corpus statistics
- Explore a nearby 2-spelling cluster: ascent · assent. Nearby cluster
- Grammar often disambiguates this cluster, match the meaning to the part of speech before picking a spelling. Pick by meaning
PlainSpell is a reference corpus, not spelling advice. Verify unusual forms in context.