English homophones
seas/sees/seize
"seas" is a noun; "sees" is a verb - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #30 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "seas" arrives as a noun, while "sees" is a verb. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "se" then splits - "seas" (4 letters) vs "sees" (4).
- Shared stem "se" then splits - "seas" (4 letters) vs "seize" (5).
- Shared stem "se" then splits - "sees" (4 letters) vs "seize" (5).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across seas, sees, seize: es. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
seas
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVVC
Inventory aes · private a
sees
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVVC
Inventory es · no private letters vs siblings
seize
5 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVVCV
Inventory eisz · private iz
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "seas" when you mean: plural of sea
- Write "sees" when you mean: third-person singular simple present indicative of see
- Write "seize" when you mean: To deliberately take hold of; to grab or capture.
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 3-spelling cluster (seas, sees, seize). Here's where to go from here.
- "sees" is the most frequent headword in this 3-spelling cluster (rank #2,558 in English). Full entry
- Among English homophone groups, a cluster of 3 spellings ranks #30 by size (1,007 groups in this vintage). Corpus statistics
- Explore a nearby 3-spelling cluster: Sacks · sax · sacs. 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.