English homophones
mackintosh/McIntosh
"mackintosh" is a noun; "McIntosh" is a name - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "mackintosh" arrives as a noun, while "McIntosh" is a name. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- No shared spelling stem: "mackintosh" is 10 letters, "McIntosh" is 8; only the sound ties them.
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across mackintosh, McIntosh: chimnost. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
mackintosh
10 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVCCVCCVCC
Inventory achikmnost · private ak
McIntosh
8 letters · 2 vowels · shape CCVCCVCC
Inventory chimnost · no private letters vs siblings
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "mackintosh" when you mean: A waterproof long coat made of rubberized cloth.
- Write "McIntosh" when you mean: A surname from Scottish Gaelic.
Known mistypes of these spellings
Edit-distance variants recorded against this cluster: useful when a search or OCR feed lands on the wrong form.
- mackintosh ← amckintosh · macckintosh · macikntosh · mackinntosh · mackinotsh · mackintohs
- McIntosh ← cmintosh · mccintosh · mcinntosh · mcinotsh · mcintohs · mcintoshh
Each spelling
Nearby English homophone groups
What to do next
You've reviewed the 2-spelling cluster (mackintosh, McIntosh). Here's where to go from here.
- "McIntosh" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #24,825 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: mall · maul. 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.