English homophones
guessed/guest
"guessed" is a verb; "guest" 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: "guessed" arrives as a verb, while "guest" is a noun. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "gues" then splits - "guessed" (7 letters) vs "guest" (5).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across guessed, guest: egsu. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
guessed
7 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVVCCVC
Inventory degsu · private d
guest
5 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVVCC
Inventory egstu · private t
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "guessed" when you mean: simple past and past participle of guess
- Write "guest" when you mean: A recipient of hospitality, especially someone staying by invitation at the house of another.
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 (guessed, guest). Here's where to go from here.
- "guest" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #2,579 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: geyser · Giza. 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.