English homophones
cats/Katz
"cats" is a noun; "Katz" 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: "cats" arrives as a noun, while "Katz" is a name. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- No shared spelling stem: "cats" is 4 letters, "Katz" is 4; only the sound ties them.
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across cats, Katz: at. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
cats
4 letters · 1 vowels · shape CVCC
Inventory acst · private cs
Katz
4 letters · 1 vowels · shape CVCC
Inventory aktz · private kz
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "cats" when you mean: plural of cat
- Write "Katz" when you mean: A surname; variant form Kats.
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 (cats, Katz). Here's where to go from here.
- "cats" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #3,215 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: cox · cocks. 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.