English homophones
fa/far
"fa" is a noun; "far" 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: "fa" arrives as a noun, while "far" is an adjective. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "fa" then splits - "fa" (2 letters) vs "far" (3).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across fa, far: af. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
fa
2 letters · 1 vowels · shape CV
Inventory af · no private letters vs siblings
far
3 letters · 1 vowels · shape CVC
Inventory afr · private r
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "fa" when you mean: A syllable used in solfège to represent the fourth diatonic (or sixth chromatic) note of a major scale.
- Write "far" when you mean: Distant; remote in space.
Each spelling
Nearby English homophone groups
What to do next
You've reviewed the 2-spelling cluster (fa, far). Here's where to go from here.
- "far" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #295 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: Finn · fin. 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.