English homophones
cate/Kate
"cate" is a noun; "Kate" 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: "cate" arrives as a noun, while "Kate" is a name. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- No shared spelling stem: "cate" is 4 letters, "Kate" is 4; only the sound ties them.
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across cate, Kate: aet. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
cate
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCV
Inventory acet · private c
Kate
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCV
Inventory aekt · private k
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "cate" when you mean: A delicacy or item of food.
- Write "Kate" when you mean: A diminutive of the female given name Katherine and related names, also used as a formal given name.
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 (cate, Kate). Here's where to go from here.
- "Kate" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #4,027 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: cash · cache. 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.