English homophones
born/borne/bourne
"born" is a verb; "bourne" is a noun - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #30 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "born" arrives as a verb, while "bourne" is a noun. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "born" then splits - "born" (4 letters) vs "borne" (5).
- Shared stem "bo" then splits - "born" (4 letters) vs "bourne" (6).
- Shared stem "bo" then splits - "borne" (5 letters) vs "bourne" (6).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across born, borne, bourne: bnor. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
born
4 letters · 1 vowels · shape CVCC
Inventory bnor · no private letters vs siblings
borne
5 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCCV
Inventory benor · private e
bourne
6 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVVCCV
Inventory benoru · private eu
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "born" when you mean: past participle of bear; given birth to.
- Write "borne" when you mean: past participle of bear
- Write "bourne" when you mean: A boundary; a limit.
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 3-spelling cluster (born, borne, bourne). Here's where to go from here.
- "born" is the most frequent headword in this 3-spelling cluster (rank #843 in English). Full entry
- Among English homophone groups, a cluster of 3 spellings ranks #30 by size (1,007 groups in this vintage). Corpus statistics
- Explore a nearby 3-spelling cluster: be · bee · Bea. 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.