English homophones
foul/fowl
"foul" is an adjective; "fowl" 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: "foul" arrives as an adjective, while "fowl" is a noun. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "fo" then splits - "foul" (4 letters) vs "fowl" (4).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across foul, fowl: flo. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
foul
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVVC
Inventory flou · private u
fowl
4 letters · 1 vowels · shape CVCC
Inventory flow · private w
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "foul" when you mean: Covered with, or containing unclean matter; dirty.
- Write "fowl" when you mean: A bird hunted or kept for food, grouped into landfowl (order Galliformes), also called gamefowl, and waterfowl (order Anseriformes: ducks…
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
noun · /faʊl/ · #28,924 frequency
A bird hunted or kept for food, grouped into landfowl (order Galliformes), also called gamefowl, and waterfowl (order Anseriformes: ducks, geese, swans, etc.), which together form the clade Galloanserae.
Nearby English homophone groups
What to do next
You've reviewed the 2-spelling cluster (foul, fowl). Here's where to go from here.
- "foul" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #6,574 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: flee · flea. 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.