English homophones
shared/shed
"shared" is an adjective; "shed" is a verb - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "shared" arrives as an adjective, while "shed" is a verb. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "sh" then splits - "shared" (6 letters) vs "shed" (4).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across shared, shed: dehs. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
shared
6 letters · 2 vowels · shape CCVCVC
Inventory adehrs · private ar
shed
4 letters · 1 vowels · shape CCVC
Inventory dehs · no private letters vs siblings
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "shared" when you mean: Used by multiple entities or for multiple purposes or in multiple ways.
- Write "shed" when you mean: To part, separate or divide.
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 (shared, shed). Here's where to go from here.
- "shared" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #2,128 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: sunny · sonny. 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.