English homophones
centered/centred
"centered" is an adjective; "centred" 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: "centered" arrives as an adjective, while "centred" is a verb. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "cent" then splits - "centered" (8 letters) vs "centred" (7).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across centered, centred: cdenrt. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
centered
8 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVCCVCVC
Inventory cdenrt · no private letters vs siblings
centred
7 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCCCVC
Inventory cdenrt · no private letters vs siblings
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "centered" when you mean: Middlemost; located at the center.
- Write "centred" when you mean: simple past and past participle of centre
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 (centered, centred). Here's where to go from here.
- "centered" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #7,203 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: coal · cole. 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.