English homophones

chez/shay/Shea

"chez" is a preposition; "shay" is a noun - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #30 of 1,007 English groups.

Data vintage 2026-09-03

Grammar picks the spelling

Same sound, different grammar: "chez" arrives as a preposition, while "shay" is a noun. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.

Spelling pairs in this cluster

No shared spelling stem: "chez" is 4 letters, "shay" is 4; only the sound ties them.
No shared spelling stem: "chez" is 4 letters, "Shea" is 4; only the sound ties them.
Shared stem "sh" then splits - "shay" (4 letters) vs "Shea" (4).

Orthographic DNA of this cluster

Shared letters across chez, shay, Shea: h. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.

chez
4 letters · 1 vowels · shape CCVC
Inventory cehz · private cez
shay
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CCVV
Inventory ahsy · private asy
Shea
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CCVV
Inventory aehs · private aes

Pick the spelling from the meaning

Write "chez" when you mean: At the home of.
Write "shay" when you mean: A chaise.
Write "Shea" when you mean: A surname from Irish.

Known mistypes of these spellings

Edit-distance variants recorded against this cluster: useful when a search or OCR feed lands on the wrong form.

chez ← cchez · cehz · chezz · chhez · chze · hcez
shay ← hsay · sahy · shayy · shhay · shya · sshay
Shea ← hsea · seha · shae · shhea · sshea

Each spelling

chez

preposition · /ʃeɪ/ · #30,730 frequency

At the home of.

shay

noun · /ʃeɪ/ · #24,586 frequency

A chaise.

Shea

name · /ʃeɪ/ · #17,717 frequency

A surname from Irish.

Nearby English homophone groups

What to do next

You've reviewed the 3-spelling cluster (chez, shay, Shea). Here's where to go from here.

"Shea" is the most frequent headword in this 3-spelling cluster (rank #17,717 in English). Full entry
Among English homophone groups, a cluster of 3 spellings ranks #30 by size (1,007 groups in this vintage). Corpus statistics
Explore a nearby 3-spelling cluster: car · ka · carr. 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.