English homophones
said/sed
"said" is a verb; "sed" is a name - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "said" arrives as a verb, while "sed" is a name. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- No shared spelling stem: "said" is 4 letters, "sed" is 3; only the sound ties them.
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across said, sed: ds. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
said
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVVC
Inventory adis · private ai
sed
3 letters · 1 vowels · shape CVC
Inventory des · private e
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "said" when you mean: simple past and past participle of say
- Write "sed" when you mean: A noninteractive text editor (originally developed in Unix), intended for making systematic edits in an automatic or batch-oriented way.
Known mistypes of these spellings
Edit-distance variants recorded against this cluster: useful when a search or OCR feed lands on the wrong form.
- said ← asid · sadi · saidd · siad · ssaid
Each spelling
Nearby English homophone groups
What to do next
You've reviewed the 2-spelling cluster (said, sed). Here's where to go from here.
- "said" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #100 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: smith · Smythe. 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.