English homophones
nigh/nye
"nigh" is an adjective; "nye" 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: "nigh" arrives as an adjective, while "nye" is a noun. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- No shared spelling stem: "nigh" is 4 letters, "nye" is 3; only the sound ties them.
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across nigh, nye: n. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
nigh
4 letters · 1 vowels · shape CVCC
Inventory ghin · private ghi
nye
3 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVV
Inventory eny · private ey
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "nigh" when you mean: Near, close by.
- Write "nye" when you mean: A brood or flock of pheasants.
Known mistypes of these spellings
Edit-distance variants recorded against this cluster: useful when a search or OCR feed lands on the wrong form.
- nigh ← ingh · ngih · niggh · nighh · nihg · nnigh
Each spelling
Nearby English homophone groups
What to do next
You've reviewed the 2-spelling cluster (nigh, nye). Here's where to go from here.
- "nye" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #19,151 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: Nicholas · Nicolas. 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.