English homophones
hay/haye/hey
"hay" is a noun; "hey" is an intj - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #30 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "hay" arrives as a noun, while "hey" is an intj. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "hay" then splits - "hay" (3 letters) vs "haye" (4).
- No shared spelling stem: "hay" is 3 letters, "hey" is 3; only the sound ties them.
- No shared spelling stem: "haye" is 4 letters, "hey" is 3; only the sound ties them.
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across hay, haye, hey: hy. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
hay
3 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVV
Inventory ahy · private a
haye
4 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVVV
Inventory aehy · private ae
hey
3 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVV
Inventory ehy · private e
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "hay" when you mean: Grass cut and dried for use as animal fodder.
- Write "haye" when you mean: A shark (scaleless cartilaginous fish).
- Write "hey" when you mean: An exclamation to get attention.
Known mistypes of these spellings
Edit-distance variants recorded against this cluster: useful when a search or OCR feed lands on the wrong form.
- haye ← ahye · haey · hayye · hhaye · hyae
Each spelling
Nearby English homophone groups
What to do next
You've reviewed the 3-spelling cluster (hay, haye, hey). Here's where to go from here.
- "hey" is the most frequent headword in this 3-spelling cluster (rank #787 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.