English homophones
mail/male
"mail" is a noun; "male" 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: "mail" arrives as a noun, while "male" is an adjective. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "ma" then splits - "mail" (4 letters) vs "male" (4).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across mail, male: alm. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
mail
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVVC
Inventory ailm · private i
male
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCV
Inventory aelm · private e
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "mail" when you mean: A bag or wallet.
- Write "male" when you mean: Belonging to the sex which typically produces sperm, or to the gender which is typically associated with it.
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 (mail, male). Here's where to go from here.
- "male" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #1,371 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: muse · mews. 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.