English homophones
none/nun
"none" is a pronoun; "nun" 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: "none" arrives as a pronoun, while "nun" is a noun. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- No shared spelling stem: "none" is 4 letters, "nun" is 3; only the sound ties them.
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across none, nun: n. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
none
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCV
Inventory eno · private eo
nun
3 letters · 1 vowels · shape CVC
Inventory nu · private u
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "none" when you mean: Not any of a given number or group.
- Write "nun" when you mean: A member of a Christian religious community of women who live by certain vows and usually wear a habit, (Roman Catholicism, specifically)…
Known mistypes of these spellings
Edit-distance variants recorded against this cluster: useful when a search or OCR feed lands on the wrong form.
- none ← nnoe · nnone · noen · nonne · onne
Each spelling
Nearby English homophone groups
What to do next
You've reviewed the 2-spelling cluster (none, nun). Here's where to go from here.
- "none" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #1,251 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: noise · Noyes. 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.