English homophones
brewed/brood
"brewed" is a verb; "brood" is a noun - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "brewed" arrives as a verb, while "brood" is a noun. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "br" then splits - "brewed" (6 letters) vs "brood" (5).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across brewed, brood: bdr. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
brewed
6 letters · 2 vowels · shape CCVCVC
Inventory bderw · private ew
brood
5 letters · 2 vowels · shape CCVVC
Inventory bdor · private o
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "brewed" when you mean: simple past and past participle of brew
- Write "brood" when you mean: The young of certain animals, especially a group of young birds or fowl hatched at one time by the same mother.
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 (brewed, brood). Here's where to go from here.
- "brood" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #20,863 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: Brooke · brook. 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.