English homophones
humerus/humorous
"humerus" is a noun; "humorous" 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: "humerus" arrives as a noun, while "humorous" is an adjective. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "hum" then splits - "humerus" (7 letters) vs "humorous" (8).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across humerus, humorous: hmrsu. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
humerus
7 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVCVCVC
Inventory ehmrsu · private e
humorous
8 letters · 4 vowels · shape CVCVCVVC
Inventory hmorsu · private o
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "humerus" when you mean: The bone of the upper arm.
- Write "humorous" when you mean: Full of humor or arousing laughter; funny.
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 (humerus, humorous). Here's where to go from here.
- "humorous" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #12,992 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: hmm · hmmm. 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.