English homophones
brows/browse
"brows" is a noun; "browse" 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: "brows" arrives as a noun, while "browse" is a verb. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "brows" then splits - "brows" (5 letters) vs "browse" (6).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across brows, browse: borsw. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
brows
5 letters · 1 vowels · shape CCVCC
Inventory borsw · no private letters vs siblings
browse
6 letters · 2 vowels · shape CCVCCV
Inventory beorsw · private e
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "brows" when you mean: plural of brow
- Write "browse" when you mean: To scan, to casually look through in order to find items of interest, especially without knowledge of what to look for beforehand.
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 (brows, browse). Here's where to go from here.
- "browse" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #13,109 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: blunt · Blount. 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.