English homophones
knight/night/nite
"night" (#221 written frequency) beats "knight" (#4,461) in this 3-word /naɪt/ cluster. Size rank #30 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Frequency splits the cluster
These 3 spellings keep the same /naɪt/ reading, but written frequency splits them hard: "night" leads at #221, with "knight" trailing at #4,461.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- No shared spelling stem: "knight" is 6 letters, "night" is 5; only the sound ties them.
- No shared spelling stem: "knight" is 6 letters, "nite" is 4; only the sound ties them.
- Shared stem "ni" then splits - "night" (5 letters) vs "nite" (4).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across knight, night, nite: int. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
knight
6 letters · 1 vowels · shape CCVCCC
Inventory ghiknt · private ghk
night
5 letters · 1 vowels · shape CVCCC
Inventory ghint · private gh
nite
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCV
Inventory eint · private e
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "knight" when you mean: A young servant or follower; a trained military attendant in service of a lord.
- Write "night" when you mean: The time when the Sun is below the horizon when the sky is dark.
- Write "nite" when you mean: Informal spelling of night.
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 (knight, night, nite). Here's where to go from here.
- "night" is the most frequent headword in this 3-spelling cluster (rank #221 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: new · knew · nu. Nearby cluster
- Each spelling in "knight, night, nite" has its own headword page with definition, IPA, and misspelling variants. First entry
PlainSpell is a reference corpus, not spelling advice. Verify unusual forms in context.