English homophones
hoarse/horse/hoss
"hoarse" is an adjective; "horse" 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: "hoarse" arrives as an adjective, while "horse" is a noun. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "ho" then splits - "hoarse" (6 letters) vs "horse" (5).
- Shared stem "ho" then splits - "hoarse" (6 letters) vs "hoss" (4).
- Shared stem "ho" then splits - "horse" (5 letters) vs "hoss" (4).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across hoarse, horse, hoss: hos. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
hoarse
6 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVVCCV
Inventory aehors · private aer
horse
5 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCCV
Inventory ehors · private er
hoss
4 letters · 1 vowels · shape CVCC
Inventory hos · no private letters vs siblings
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "hoarse" when you mean: Having a dry, harsh tone to the voice, as a result of a sore throat, age, emotion, etc.
- Write "horse" when you mean: A hoofed mammal, Equus ferus caballus, often used throughout history for riding and draft work.
- Write "hoss" when you mean: Pronunciation spelling of horse.
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 (hoarse, horse, hoss). Here's where to go from here.
- "horse" is the most frequent headword in this 3-spelling cluster (rank #1,793 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: he'll · heal · heel. 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.