English homophones
come/cum
"come" is a verb; "cum" is a preposition - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "come" arrives as a verb, while "cum" is a preposition. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- No shared spelling stem: "come" is 4 letters, "cum" is 3; only the sound ties them.
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across come, cum: cm. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
come
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCV
Inventory cemo · private eo
cum
3 letters · 1 vowels · shape CVC
Inventory cmu · private u
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "come" when you mean: To move nearer to the point of perspective.
- Write "cum" when you mean: Used in indicating a thing or person which has two or more roles, functions, or natures, or which has changed from one to another.
Known mistypes of these spellings
Edit-distance variants recorded against this cluster: useful when a search or OCR feed lands on the wrong form.
- come ← ccome · cmoe · coem · comme · ocme
Each spelling
Nearby English homophone groups
What to do next
You've reviewed the 2-spelling cluster (come, cum). Here's where to go from here.
- "come" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #161 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: cats · Katz. 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.