English homophones
Lilly/lily
"Lilly" is a name; "lily" is a noun - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "Lilly" arrives as a name, while "lily" is a noun. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "lil" then splits - "Lilly" (5 letters) vs "lily" (4).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across Lilly, lily: ily. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
Lilly
5 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCCV
Inventory ily · no private letters vs siblings
lily
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCV
Inventory ily · no private letters vs siblings
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "Lilly" when you mean: A female given name, variant of Lily.
- Write "lily" when you mean: Any of several flowers in the genus Lilium of the family Liliaceae, which includes a great many ornamental species.
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 (Lilly, lily). Here's where to go from here.
- "lily" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #7,709 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: Lyndon · linden. 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.