English homophones
breast/Brest
"breast" is a noun; "Brest" is a name - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "breast" arrives as a noun, while "Brest" is a name. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "bre" then splits - "breast" (6 letters) vs "Brest" (5).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across breast, Brest: berst. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
breast
6 letters · 2 vowels · shape CCVVCC
Inventory aberst · private a
Brest
5 letters · 1 vowels · shape CCVCC
Inventory berst · no private letters vs siblings
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "breast" when you mean: Either of the two organs on the front of a female human's chest, which contain the mammary glands; also the analogous organs in males.
- Write "Brest" when you mean: A port city in Brittany, France.
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 (breast, Brest). Here's where to go from here.
- "breast" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #3,927 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: Blythe · Blyth. 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.