English homophones
grate/great
"grate" is a noun; "great" 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: "grate" arrives as a noun, while "great" is an adjective. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "gr" then splits - "grate" (5 letters) vs "great" (5).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across grate, great: aegrt. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
grate
5 letters · 2 vowels · shape CCVCV
Inventory aegrt · no private letters vs siblings
great
5 letters · 2 vowels · shape CCVVC
Inventory aegrt · no private letters vs siblings
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "grate" when you mean: A horizontal metal grill through which liquid, ash, or small objects can fall, while larger objects cannot.
- Write "great" when you mean: Taking much space; large.
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 (grate, great). Here's where to go from here.
- "great" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #138 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: green · Greene. 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.