English homophones
rough/ruff
"rough" is an adjective; "ruff" 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: "rough" arrives as an adjective, while "ruff" is a noun. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- No shared spelling stem: "rough" is 5 letters, "ruff" is 4; only the sound ties them.
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across rough, ruff: ru. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
rough
5 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVVCC
Inventory ghoru · private gho
ruff
4 letters · 1 vowels · shape CVCC
Inventory fru · private f
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "rough" when you mean: Not smooth; uneven.
- Write "ruff" when you mean: A circular frill or ruffle on a garment, especially a starched, fluted frill at the neck in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (1560s–1620s).
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 (rough, ruff). Here's where to go from here.
- "rough" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #3,083 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: raining · reigning. 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.