English homophones
hi/high
"hi" is an intj; "high" 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: "hi" arrives as an intj, while "high" is an adjective. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "hi" then splits - "hi" (2 letters) vs "high" (4).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across hi, high: hi. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
hi
2 letters · 1 vowels · shape CV
Inventory hi · no private letters vs siblings
high
4 letters · 1 vowels · shape CVCC
Inventory ghi · private g
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "hi" when you mean: A friendly, informal, casual greeting said upon someone's arrival.
- Write "high" when you mean: Physically elevated, extending above a base or average level:
Known mistypes of these spellings
Edit-distance variants recorded against this cluster: useful when a search or OCR feed lands on the wrong form.
- high ← hgih · hhigh · higgh · highh · hihg · ihgh
Each spelling
Nearby English homophone groups
What to do next
You've reviewed the 2-spelling cluster (hi, high). Here's where to go from here.
- "high" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #172 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: hide · Hyde. 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.