English homophones
peaked/peeked/piqued
"peaked" is an adjective; "peeked" is a verb - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #30 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "peaked" arrives as an adjective, while "peeked" is a verb. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "pe" then splits - "peaked" (6 letters) vs "peeked" (6).
- No shared spelling stem: "peaked" is 6 letters, "piqued" is 6; only the sound ties them.
- No shared spelling stem: "peeked" is 6 letters, "piqued" is 6; only the sound ties them.
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across peaked, peeked, piqued: dep. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
peaked
6 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVVCVC
Inventory adekp · private ak
peeked
6 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVVCVC
Inventory dekp · private k
piqued
6 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVCVVC
Inventory deipqu · private iqu
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "peaked" when you mean: Having a peak or peaks.
- Write "peeked" when you mean: simple past and past participle of peek
- Write "piqued" when you mean: simple past and past participle of pique
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 3-spelling cluster (peaked, peeked, piqued). Here's where to go from here.
- "peaked" is the most frequent headword in this 3-spelling cluster (rank #15,023 in English). Full entry
- Among English homophone groups, a cluster of 3 spellings ranks #30 by size (1,007 groups in this vintage). Corpus statistics
- Explore a nearby 3-spelling cluster: prior · Pryor · Praia. 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.