English homophones
fair/fare
"fair" is an adjective; "fare" 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: "fair" arrives as an adjective, while "fare" is a noun. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "fa" then splits - "fair" (4 letters) vs "fare" (4).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across fair, fare: afr. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
fair
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVVC
Inventory afir · private i
fare
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCV
Inventory aefr · private e
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "fair" when you mean: Beautiful, of a pleasing appearance, with a pure and fresh quality.
- Write "fare" when you mean: A going; journey; travel; voyage; course; passage.
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 (fair, fare). Here's where to go from here.
- "fair" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #1,104 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: femme · fem. 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.