English homophones
bold/bowled
"bold" is an adjective; "bowled" is a verb - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "bold" arrives as an adjective, while "bowled" is a verb. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "bo" then splits - "bold" (4 letters) vs "bowled" (6).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across bold, bowled: bdlo. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
bold
4 letters · 1 vowels · shape CVCC
Inventory bdlo · no private letters vs siblings
bowled
6 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCCVC
Inventory bdelow · private ew
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "bold" when you mean: Courageous, daring.
- Write "bowled" when you mean: simple past and past participle of bowl
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 (bold, bowled). Here's where to go from here.
- "bold" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #4,579 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: beach · beech. 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.