English homophones
holy/wholly
"holy" is an adjective; "wholly" is an adverb - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "holy" arrives as an adjective, while "wholly" is an adverb. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- No shared spelling stem: "holy" is 4 letters, "wholly" is 6; only the sound ties them.
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across holy, wholly: hloy. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
holy
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCV
Inventory hloy · no private letters vs siblings
wholly
6 letters · 2 vowels · shape CCVCCV
Inventory hlowy · private w
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "holy" when you mean: Dedicated to a religious purpose or a god.
- Write "wholly" when you mean: Completely and entirely; to the fullest extent; (loosely, exaggeratedly) very; to a great extent.
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 (holy, wholly). Here's where to go from here.
- "holy" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #1,396 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: hurst · Hearst. 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.