English homophones
coarse/course
"coarse" is an adjective; "course" is a noun - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "coarse" arrives as an adjective, while "course" is a noun. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "co" then splits - "coarse" (6 letters) vs "course" (6).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across coarse, course: ceors. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
coarse
6 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVVCCV
Inventory aceors · private a
course
6 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVVCCV
Inventory ceorsu · private u
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "coarse" when you mean: With a rough texture; not smooth.
- Write "course" when you mean: A sequence of events.
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 (coarse, course). Here's where to go from here.
- "course" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #343 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: sig · cig. 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.