English homophones
brews/bruise
"brews" is a noun; "bruise" 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: "brews" arrives as a noun, while "bruise" is a verb. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "br" then splits - "brews" (5 letters) vs "bruise" (6).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across brews, bruise: bers. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
brews
5 letters · 1 vowels · shape CCVCC
Inventory bersw · private w
bruise
6 letters · 3 vowels · shape CCVVCV
Inventory beirsu · private iu
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "brews" when you mean: plural of brew
- Write "bruise" when you mean: To strike (a person), originally with something flat or heavy, but now specifically in such a way as to discolour the skin without breaki…
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 (brews, bruise). Here's where to go from here.
- "bruise" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #22,909 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: bark · bok. 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.