English homophones
crew/Crewe/cru
"crew" is a noun; "Crewe" is a name - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #30 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "crew" arrives as a noun, while "Crewe" is a name. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "crew" then splits - "crew" (4 letters) vs "Crewe" (5).
- Shared stem "cr" then splits - "crew" (4 letters) vs "cru" (3).
- Shared stem "cr" then splits - "Crewe" (5 letters) vs "cru" (3).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across crew, Crewe, cru: cr. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
crew
4 letters · 1 vowels · shape CCVC
Inventory cerw · private ew
Crewe
5 letters · 2 vowels · shape CCVCV
Inventory cerw · private ew
cru
3 letters · 1 vowels · shape CCV
Inventory cru · private u
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "crew" when you mean: A group of people together
- Write "Crewe" when you mean: A placename:
- Write "cru" when you mean: A vineyard or group of vineyards in France, especially one having a high reputation.
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 3-spelling cluster (crew, Crewe, cru). Here's where to go from here.
- "crew" is the most frequent headword in this 3-spelling cluster (rank #2,033 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: sent · cent · scent. 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.