English homophones
groan/grown
"groan" is a noun; "grown" is a verb - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "groan" arrives as a noun, while "grown" is a verb. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "gro" then splits - "groan" (5 letters) vs "grown" (5).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across groan, grown: gnor. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
groan
5 letters · 2 vowels · shape CCVVC
Inventory agnor · private a
grown
5 letters · 1 vowels · shape CCVCC
Inventory gnorw · private w
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "groan" when you mean: A low, mournful sound uttered in pain or grief.
- Write "grown" when you mean: past participle of grow
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 (groan, grown). Here's where to go from here.
- "grown" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #2,158 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: greaves · grieves. 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.