English homophones
meager/meagre
"meager" is an adjective; "meagre" 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: "meager" arrives as an adjective, while "meagre" is a noun. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "meag" then splits - "meager" (6 letters) vs "meagre" (6).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across meager, meagre: aegmr. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
meager
6 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVVCVC
Inventory aegmr · no private letters vs siblings
meagre
6 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVVCCV
Inventory aegmr · no private letters vs siblings
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "meager" when you mean: Having little flesh; lean; thin.
- Write "meagre" when you mean: An edible fish, of species Argyrosomus regius, of the family Sciaenidae, found from the Black Sea to the eastern Atlantic.
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 (meager, meagre). Here's where to go from here.
- "meager" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #27,213 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: max · macs. 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.