English homophones
sic/sick
"sic" is an adverb; "sick" is an adjective - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "sic" arrives as an adverb, while "sick" is an adjective. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "sic" then splits - "sic" (3 letters) vs "sick" (4).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across sic, sick: cis. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
sic
3 letters · 1 vowels · shape CVC
Inventory cis · no private letters vs siblings
sick
4 letters · 1 vowels · shape CVCC
Inventory ciks · private k
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "sic" when you mean: Thus; as written; used to indicate, for example, that text is being quoted as it is from the source.
- Write "sick" when you mean: In poor health; ill.
Known mistypes of these spellings
Edit-distance variants recorded against this cluster: useful when a search or OCR feed lands on the wrong form.
- sick ← isck · scik · sicck · sickk · sikc · ssick
Each spelling
Nearby English homophone groups
What to do next
You've reviewed the 2-spelling cluster (sic, sick). Here's where to go from here.
- "sick" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #1,410 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: slick · SLC. 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.