English homophones
hole/whole
"hole" is a noun; "whole" 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: "hole" arrives as a noun, while "whole" is an adjective. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- No shared spelling stem: "hole" is 4 letters, "whole" is 5; only the sound ties them.
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across hole, whole: ehlo. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
hole
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCV
Inventory ehlo · no private letters vs siblings
whole
5 letters · 2 vowels · shape CCVCV
Inventory ehlow · private w
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "hole" when you mean: A hollow place or cavity; an excavation; a pit; a dent; a depression; a fissure.
- Write "whole" when you mean: Entire, undivided.
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 2-spelling cluster (hole, whole). Here's where to go from here.
- "whole" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #333 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: hick · hic. 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.