English homophones

him/hymn

"him" is a pronoun; "hymn" is a noun - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.

Data vintage 2026-09-03

Grammar picks the spelling

Same sound, different grammar: "him" arrives as a pronoun, while "hymn" is a noun. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.

No shared spelling stem: "him" is 3 letters, "hymn" is 4; only the sound ties them.

Shared letters across him, hymn: hm. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.

Write "him" when you mean: A masculine pronoun; he as a grammatical object.
Write "hymn" when you mean: A song of praise or worship, especially a religious one.

Edit-distance variants recorded against this cluster: useful when a search or OCR feed lands on the wrong form.

pronoun · /ˈhɪm/ · #82 frequency

A masculine pronoun; he as a grammatical object.

noun · /hɪm/ · #12,791 frequency

A song of praise or worship, especially a religious one.

What to do next

You've reviewed the 2-spelling cluster (him, hymn). Here's where to go from here.

"him" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #82 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: Hendrix · Hendricks. 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.