English homophones
frees/freeze/frieze
"frees" is a verb; "frieze" is a noun - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #30 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "frees" arrives as a verb, while "frieze" is a noun. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "free" then splits - "frees" (5 letters) vs "freeze" (6).
- Shared stem "fr" then splits - "frees" (5 letters) vs "frieze" (6).
- Shared stem "fr" then splits - "freeze" (6 letters) vs "frieze" (6).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across frees, freeze, frieze: efr. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
frees
5 letters · 2 vowels · shape CCVVC
Inventory efrs · private s
freeze
6 letters · 3 vowels · shape CCVVCV
Inventory efrz · private z
frieze
6 letters · 3 vowels · shape CCVVCV
Inventory efirz · private iz
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "frees" when you mean: third-person singular simple present indicative of free
- Write "freeze" when you mean: Especially of a liquid, to become solid due to low temperature.
- Write "frieze" when you mean: A kind of coarse woollen cloth or stuff with a shaggy or tufted (friezed) nap on one side.
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 3-spelling cluster (frees, freeze, frieze). Here's where to go from here.
- "freeze" is the most frequent headword in this 3-spelling cluster (rank #5,965 in English). Full entry
- Among English homophone groups, a cluster of 3 spellings ranks #30 by size (1,007 groups in this vintage). Corpus statistics
- Explore a nearby 3-spelling cluster: few · phew · feu. 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.