English homophones
haw/whore
"haw" is an intj; "whore" 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: "haw" arrives as an intj, while "whore" is a noun. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- No shared spelling stem: "haw" is 3 letters, "whore" is 5; only the sound ties them.
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across haw, whore: hw. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
haw
3 letters · 1 vowels · shape CVC
Inventory ahw · private a
whore
5 letters · 2 vowels · shape CCVCV
Inventory ehorw · private eor
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "haw" when you mean: An imitation of laughter, often used to express scorn or disbelief. Often doubled or tripled (haw haw or haw haw haw).
- Write "whore" when you mean: Synonym of prostitute: a person (especially a woman) who offers sexual services for payment.
Known mistypes of these spellings
Edit-distance variants recorded against this cluster: useful when a search or OCR feed lands on the wrong form.
- whore ← hwore · whhore · whoer · whorre · whroe · wohre
Each spelling
Nearby English homophone groups
What to do next
You've reviewed the 2-spelling cluster (haw, whore). Here's where to go from here.
- "whore" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #8,877 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.