English homophones
daily/Daley/Daly
"daily" is an adjective; "Daley" 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: "daily" arrives as an adjective, while "Daley" is a name. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "da" then splits - "daily" (5 letters) vs "Daley" (5).
- Shared stem "da" then splits - "daily" (5 letters) vs "Daly" (4).
- Shared stem "dal" then splits - "Daley" (5 letters) vs "Daly" (4).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across daily, Daley, Daly: adly. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
daily
5 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVVCV
Inventory adily · private i
Daley
5 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVCVV
Inventory adely · private e
Daly
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCV
Inventory adly · no private letters vs siblings
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "daily" when you mean: That occurs every day, or at least every working day.
- Write "Daley" when you mean: A surname from Irish.
- Write "Daly" 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.
Each spelling
Nearby English homophone groups
What to do next
You've reviewed the 3-spelling cluster (daily, Daley, Daly). Here's where to go from here.
- "daily" is the most frequent headword in this 3-spelling cluster (rank #899 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: Davey · Davy · devi. 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.