English homophones
sane/seine
"sane" is an adjective; "seine" 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: "sane" arrives as an adjective, while "seine" is a noun. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- No shared spelling stem: "sane" is 4 letters, "seine" is 5; only the sound ties them.
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across sane, seine: ens. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
sane
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCV
Inventory aens · private a
seine
5 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVVCV
Inventory eins · private i
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "sane" when you mean: Being in a healthy condition; not deranged; thinking rationally.
- Write "seine" when you mean: A long net having floats attached at the top and sinkers (weights) at the bottom, used in shallow water for catching fish.
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 (sane, seine). Here's where to go from here.
- "sane" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #11,791 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: statesman · statesmen. 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.