English homophones
elicit/illicit
"elicit" is a verb; "illicit" 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: "elicit" arrives as a verb, while "illicit" is an adjective. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- No shared spelling stem: "elicit" is 6 letters, "illicit" is 7; only the sound ties them.
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across elicit, illicit: cilt. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
elicit
6 letters · 3 vowels · shape VCVCVC
Inventory ceilt · private e
illicit
7 letters · 3 vowels · shape VCCVCVC
Inventory cilt · no private letters vs siblings
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "elicit" when you mean: To evoke, educe (emotions, feelings, responses, etc.); to generate, obtain, or provoke as a response or answer.
- Write "illicit" when you mean: Not approved by law, but not invalid.
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 (elicit, illicit). Here's where to go from here.
- "illicit" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #16,498 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: each · ich. 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.