English homophones
grease/Greece
"grease" is a noun; "Greece" is a name - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "grease" arrives as a noun, while "Greece" is a name. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "gre" then splits - "grease" (6 letters) vs "Greece" (6).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across grease, Greece: egr. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
grease
6 letters · 3 vowels · shape CCVVCV
Inventory aegrs · private as
Greece
6 letters · 3 vowels · shape CCVVCV
Inventory cegr · private c
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "grease" when you mean: Animal fat in a melted or soft state.
- Write "Greece" when you mean: A country in Southeast Europe. Official name: Hellenic Republic. Capital and largest city: Athens.
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 (grease, Greece). Here's where to go from here.
- "Greece" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #4,453 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: gains · Gaines. 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.