English homophones
finish/Finnish
"finish" is a noun; "Finnish" 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: "finish" arrives as a noun, while "Finnish" is an adjective. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "fin" then splits - "finish" (6 letters) vs "Finnish" (7).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across finish, Finnish: fhins. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
finish
6 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCVCC
Inventory fhins · no private letters vs siblings
Finnish
7 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCCVCC
Inventory fhins · no private letters vs siblings
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "finish" when you mean: An end; the end of anything.
- Write "Finnish" when you mean: Of or pertaining to Finland or the Finns; Finlandic, Finlandish.
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 (finish, Finnish). Here's where to go from here.
- "finish" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #1,305 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.