English homophones
savanna/Savannah
"savanna" is a noun; "Savannah" 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: "savanna" arrives as a noun, while "Savannah" is a name. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "savanna" then splits - "savanna" (7 letters) vs "Savannah" (8).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across savanna, Savannah: ansv. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
savanna
7 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVCVCCV
Inventory ansv · no private letters vs siblings
Savannah
8 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVCVCCVC
Inventory ahnsv · private h
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "savanna" when you mean: A mixed woodland-grassland biome and ecosystem characterised by the trees being sufficiently widely spaced so that the canopy does not cl…
- Write "Savannah" when you mean: A locality in the Shire of Carpentaria, Queensland, Australia.
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 (savanna, Savannah). Here's where to go from here.
- "Savannah" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #12,677 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: Segway · segue. 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.