English homophones
he'll/heal/heel
"heal" is a verb; "heel" is a noun - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #30 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "heal" arrives as a verb, while "heel" is a noun. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "he" then splits - "he'll" (5 letters) vs "heal" (4).
- Shared stem "he" then splits - "he'll" (5 letters) vs "heel" (4).
- Shared stem "he" then splits - "heal" (4 letters) vs "heel" (4).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across he'll, heal, heel: ehl. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
he'll
4 letters · 1 vowels · shape CVCC
Inventory ehl · no private letters vs siblings
heal
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVVC
Inventory aehl · private a
heel
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVVC
Inventory ehl · no private letters vs siblings
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "he'll" when you mean: Contraction of he + will.
- Write "heal" when you mean: To make better from a disease, wound, etc.; to revive or cure.
- Write "heel" when you mean: The rear part of the foot, where it joins the leg.
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 3-spelling cluster (he'll, heal, heel). Here's where to go from here.
- "heal" is the most frequent headword in this 3-spelling cluster (rank #5,886 in English). Full entry
- Among English homophone groups, a cluster of 3 spellings ranks #30 by size (1,007 groups in this vintage). Corpus statistics
- Explore a nearby 3-spelling cluster: horse · hoarse · hoss. 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.