English homophones
populace/populous
"populace" is a noun; "populous" is an adjective - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "populace" arrives as a noun, while "populous" is an adjective. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "popul" then splits - "populace" (8 letters) vs "populous" (8).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across populace, populous: lopu. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
populace
8 letters · 4 vowels · shape CVCVCVCV
Inventory acelopu · private ace
populous
8 letters · 4 vowels · shape CVCVCVVC
Inventory lopsu · private s
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "populace" when you mean: The common people of a nation.
- Write "populous" when you mean: Having a large population.
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 (populace, populous). Here's where to go from here.
- "populous" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #16,998 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: pilot · Pilate. 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.