English homophones
civilised/civilized
"civilised" is a verb; "civilized" is an adjective - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "civilised" arrives as a verb, while "civilized" is an adjective. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "civili" then splits - "civilised" (9 letters) vs "civilized" (9).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across civilised, civilized: cdeilv. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
civilised
9 letters · 4 vowels · shape CVCVCVCVC
Inventory cdeilsv · private s
civilized
9 letters · 4 vowels · shape CVCVCVCVC
Inventory cdeilvz · private z
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "civilised" when you mean: simple past and past participle of civilise
- Write "civilized" when you mean: Having a highly developed society or culture; belonging to civilization.
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 (civilised, civilized). Here's where to go from here.
- "civilized" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #14,492 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: canon · cannon. 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.