English homophones
praise/prays
"praise" is a noun; "prays" is a verb - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "praise" arrives as a noun, while "prays" is a verb. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "pra" then splits - "praise" (6 letters) vs "prays" (5).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across praise, prays: aprs. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
praise
6 letters · 3 vowels · shape CCVVCV
Inventory aeiprs · private ei
prays
5 letters · 2 vowels · shape CCVVC
Inventory aprsy · private y
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "praise" when you mean: Commendation; favourable representation in words.
- Write "prays" when you mean: third-person singular simple present indicative of pray
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 (praise, prays). Here's where to go from here.
- "praise" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #4,259 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: Pearson · Pierson. 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.