English homophones
paltry/poultry
"paltry" is an adjective; "poultry" 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: "paltry" arrives as an adjective, while "poultry" is a noun. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- No shared spelling stem: "paltry" is 6 letters, "poultry" is 7; only the sound ties them.
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across paltry, poultry: lprty. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
paltry
6 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCCCV
Inventory alprty · private a
poultry
7 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVVCCCV
Inventory loprtuy · private ou
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "paltry" when you mean: Trashy, trivial, of little value.
- Write "poultry" when you mean: Domestic fowl (e.g. chickens, ducks, turkeys, geese) raised for food (meat, eggs, or both).
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 (paltry, poultry). Here's where to go from here.
- "poultry" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #14,191 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: per · purr. 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.