English homophones
hail/hale
"hail" is a noun; "hale" 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: "hail" arrives as a noun, while "hale" is an adjective. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "ha" then splits - "hail" (4 letters) vs "hale" (4).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across hail, hale: ahl. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
hail
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVVC
Inventory ahil · private i
hale
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCV
Inventory aehl · private e
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "hail" when you mean: Balls or pieces of ice falling as precipitation, often in connection with a thunderstorm.
- Write "hale" when you mean: Sound, entire, healthy; robust, not impaired.
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 (hail, hale). Here's where to go from here.
- "hail" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #8,042 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: humor · humour. 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.